Climateurope2 is an EU-funded project advancing future equitable and quality-assured climate services of greater value to society, providing trustworthy, user-relevant and usable information. The project works to develop standardisation procedures and recommendations for climate services, while supporting and bringing together the European climate services community. In addition, Climateurope2 strives to promote the uptake of quality-assured climate services to support adaptation and mitigation to climate change and variability. The project consortium gathers actors spanning a wide spectrum of technical expertise and climate services as well as social sciences and humanities.

One part of the project, is to identify the support and standardisation needs of climate services, including criteria for certification and labelling, along with the user-driven criteria needed to support climate action. The gathered information is used to propose a taxonomy of climate services, suggest community-based good practices and guidelines, and propose standards where possible. Climateurope2 serves as a platform to build a community of practice for this standardisation using approaches from social sciences and humanities, alongside extensive technical expertise. The project aims for co-production and stakeholder engagement and therefore created a network of different European climate services actors. To support this community, a large variety of interactive and innovative activities are organised.

This townhall will present some of the project's latest achievements, in particular the newly developed set of recommendations on data & processes covering the following topics: metadata and standards, traceability, verification, and uncertainty and climate risk assessment. The goal will be to gather feedback on the developed guidelines to inform the synthesizing process before delivering recommendations for future certification and labelling. We will also present the Climateurope2 Platform as an entry point for ongoing engagement and collaboration across the climate service community. The session will foster open discussion and exchange among all stakeholders in the climate service community, encouraging community building, and knowledge exchange.

The Kotak School of Sustainability (KSS) at IIT Kanpur is India’s first dedicated academic and research school focused entirely on advancing sustainability through science, technology, policy, and innovation. KSS seeks to bring together scientists, engineers, and policymakers to address pressing global and regional challenges related to climate change, extreme weather, air quality, clean energy transition, water management systems, environmental resilience, and sustainable development pathways
This townhall meeting aims to introduce the vision, mission, and strategic priorities of the Kotak School of Sustainability to the international community at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) Assembly. It will highlight ongoing and emerging research initiatives, thematic clusters, and collaborative platforms under development at KSS, while showcasing how the School seeks to serve as a hub for advancing sustainability research and capacity building in India and beyond. The session intends to create a dialogue space for meaningful engagement between KSS and the global geoscience community.
The townhall will include a moderated discussion and open floor engagement. Key questions will include:
• How can global North–South partnerships be structured to advance sustainability science and societal impact?
• What geoscience-driven research themes offer the greatest potential for collaborative action?
The discussion will highlight opportunities for international research collaboration, joint academic initiatives, faculty and student mobility, co-design of research projects, technology co-development and partnerships. Special attention will be given to opportunities for early-career researchers, doctoral students, postdoctoral scholars, and academic collaborators interested in contributing to KSS’s growing ecosystem in sustainability science.
The target audience includes geoscientists, climate researchers, environmental scientists, policy experts, academic leaders, research institutions, funding bodies, and industry or societal stakeholders interested in collaborative sustainability initiatives.
Expected outcomes of this townhall include identifying potential partners, shaping collaborative research priorities, initiating discussions toward formal institutional linkages, and establishing pathways for knowledge exchange and capacity building. The session will also highlight prospective job and career opportunities at the Kotak School of Sustainability, including future faculty, postdoctoral, and research positions. This townhall shall build long-term international networks that strengthen global cooperation and accelerate impactful solutions for a more sustainable and resilient future.

"A journey through turbulence and climate change using multiple-art media" - this project proposes two artistic performances that build a strong emotional connection to two key topics within the Geosciences: turbulence in fluid dynamics and climate change. The first part of the project jointly leverages multiple-art media to trigger an emotional connection to how our actions today affect the climate that future generations will live in. We will express data on the recent and projected future climate and climate extremes in the form of music and moving image, engaging the audience through multiple senses. The second part of the project transforms real and simulated fluid dynamics data—governed by the Navier-Stokes equations—into music, movement, and visuals. Using both experimental measurements from the von Kármán setup at SPEC and numerical simulations. We would like to present the results of the first part of the project, in the form of an audiovisual performance, at a Townhall meeting during EGU 2026.
The performance will focus on the time delay between action and consequence: what we do today affects future generations. Decisions that we take today can force an undesirable climatic future on future generations, and limit their freedom of choice. A related theme is the disappearance of possibilities. When we make choices today which are not in line with minimising climate change, we are effectively making certain climatic futures less likely, or even impossible.
The target audience is broad, spanning most divisions of EGU, as we believe that the majority of EGU attendees has an interest for the ongoing human-driven changes in Earth’s climate system. The outcome that we hope to achieve is an emotional connection to the human relevance of climate change, beyond the scientific and quantitative understanding of climate change that many of EGU’s attendees likely already have. We indeed argue that music and visual art offer a compelling way to connect scientific understanding with emotional understanding. This is fully in line with EGU’s value to promote the use of geoscience knowledge for the benefit of humanity and the planet.

The year 2024 was the warmest on record, with climate-related disasters displacing 46 million people worldwide and natural catastrophes causing $417 billion in economic losses. In South America, the convergence of climate change–driven temperature anomalies, deforestation, and El Niño triggered severe droughts, resulting in unprecedented agricultural losses, escalating water-use conflicts, and rising political instability across commodity-dependent economies. In the Brazilian Amazon, 2024 marked the worst drought in 120 years, directly affecting hundreds of thousands of riverside and Indigenous communities.
Within this challenging climate landscape, the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) convened in Belém in 2025 amid high expectations. Framed by Brazil’s president as the “COP of Truth,” the summit aimed to confront climate denial with scientific evidence and expose the gap between political rhetoric and concrete action. Central to this effort was the “Baku-to-Belém Mission to 1.5,” urging countries to clarify and strengthen emissions-reduction and adaptation targets. Yet attempts to raise ambition stalled, revealing deep divisions over a fossil-fuel phase-out roadmap. These tensions crystallized into a “coalition of the willing”, comprising more than 80 countries committed to strengthening emissions-reduction ambitions, in opposition to resistance from major petrostates. Compounding political resistance, meeting the financial needs of countries’ conditional commitments (those dependent on external funding) remains a major hurdle, as developing countries require $1.3 trillion per year by 2035 beyond self-funded targets — a number that is still far from secured.
This raises a central question: caught between countries’ (un)willingness and (un)conditional commitments, what future should we be preparing for? This Townhall brings together South American scientists present in Belém to reflect on progress and challenges ahead. As the world’s most unequal region, South America’s climate transition is inseparable from social policy, making progress especially complex. While rooted in the South American experience, the discussion resonates across global contexts.
We will examine the financial, scientific, and ethical dimensions of climate (un)agreements at COP30, focusing on:

(a) the credibility of climate finance commitments by developed economies;
(b) the role of early career researchers in addressing imbalances in technology access and knowledge transfer; and
(c) the extent to which Indigenous and ethnic minority voices were meaningfully included.
Ultimately, this discussion confronts the unresolved tensions exposed at the “COP of Truth” and explores the road ahead for global climate governance.

The Deep-time Digital Earth (DDE) Big Science Program, initiated in 2019, is a global endeavor to harmonize and share solid Earth data. By leveraging digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, DDE aims to foster innovation and transform geoscience research. The program is coordinated by the DDE Secretariat in Suzhou, China, through an expanding worldwide network of research institutions.

DDE is proud to announce the launch of the DDE International Science Initiative (DDE-ISI). Supported by substantial funding from China’s Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) and other partners for 2025, this initiative represents a significant investment in the global geoscience community and is open to research groups of all nationalities. The DDE-ISI is structured around three strategic pillars: digital infrastructure development, international operations, and global collaboration in open scientific research. Our Townhall meeting will formally introduce the initiative, outline its objectives and eligibility, and provide a dynamic forum for brainstorming and forming research partnerships.

The scientific agenda of the DDE-ISI focuses on six priority themes: (1) Digital Technology (including AI and knowledge graphs), (2) Geological Mapping, (3) Plate Motion and Sea Level, (4) Earth Timeline and History, (5) Earth Modeling, and (6) Sustainable Development.

Funding will be allocated through a tiered framework designed to encourage collaboration among researchers at every career stage, from students to senior scientists, with particular attention to supporting early-career researchers and those from underrepresented regions. All proposals will be peer-reviewed or invited by the independent DDE Science Committee, which comprises internationally recognized experts.

The primary goal of this Townhall is to widely disseminate information about this new opportunity across the geoscience community. Expected outcomes include: (1) elevating the global profile of DDE-ISI, (2) enhancing community understanding of its goals and participation criteria, (3) facilitating direct engagement between researchers and the initiative's organizers, and (4) creating a collaborative environment to incubate pioneering research ideas.