WCRP IPOs and Secretariat Telecon in October

The International Project Offices (IPOs) and WCRP Secretariat held a teleconference on 26 October 2020. The telecon focused on the discussion of the involvement of the IPOs in the WCRP restructuring process, the updates on the Lighthouse Activities and Regional Consultations, as well as the plans for next year. 14 representatives from the WCRP Secretariat and project offices of CLIVAR, CliC, GEWEX, SPARC, CORDEX, CORA, S2S and YESS attended the meeting. The major uptakes from the meeting include:

  1. The IPOs found the slides and other background material provided by the WCRP Secretariat to be very helpful for them to advocate WCRP implementation strategy development process among their communities;
  2. The WCRP Lighthouse Activity (LHA) Task Teams are still being finalised. There was a concern that if we seek the representatives for WCRP community for the LHAs, there might be still a lack of representation from some countries and communities which were originally missing by WCRP. We need more geographic diversity, more early career scientists and more females involved in the LHA TTs. The LHAs are planned to be launched in 2021;
  3. The first teleconference for the Regional Consultation of Groups 4 (Asia and Oceania) and 2 (South America) have been organised. The Example of Approach to Virtual Town Halls (VTHs) has been drafted. The Regional Groups might be divided into sub-groups to facilitate VTHs organisation. Regional contact databases are being formulated. It is also important to think about how to maintain the regional involvement, rather than a one-off action;
  4. The deadline for WCRP Model-Data Home Scenarios Survey is 31 October 2020. GSOP and OMDP from CLIVAR will provide feedbacks to the survey;
  5. The organization of in-person meetings in 2021 is still not promising due to the Coronavirus pandemic, and there are suggestions received from IPOs to allocate the WCRP beyond the traditional activities (e.g. to purchase license for the online meeting platform, to pay for training cost, fellowships, community papers, data storage, and etc.), and some funds might have to be allocated to the new elements of WCRP structure;
  6. The carbon footprint for WCRP has dramatically decreased as a result of travel limitation by COVID-19. A small team within WCRP has been formulated to work on WCRP Carbon Footprint. The team will do a simple calculation of carbon emission based on the 2019 WCRP community travel data provided by IPOs and try to formulate a strategy for prioritising the future travels to attend WCRP activities. Though online meetings help reduce carbon emissions, we cannot completely get rid of in-person meetings;
  7. The next Telecon for WCRP Secretariat and IPOs will organised in December after the extraordinary JSC meeting.