Societal Benefit Areas

The Societal Benefit Areas (SBAs) are eight environmental fields of interest, all of which relate to climate, around which the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) project is exerting its efforts. These include: Biodiversity and Ecosystem Sustainability, Disaster Resilience, Energy and Mineral Resources Management, Food Security and Sustainable Agriculture, Infrastructure and Transport Management, Public Health Surveillance, Sustainable Urban Development, and Water Resources Management around which a preliminary hierarchical vocabulary has been created. The Societal Benefit Areas (SBAs) are eight environmental fields of interest, all of which relate to climate, around which the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) project is exerting its efforts. These include: Biodiversity and Ecosystem Sustainability, Disaster Resilience, Energy and Mineral Resources Management, Food Security and Sustainable Agriculture, Infrastructure and Transport Management, Public Health Surveillance, Sustainable Urban Development, and Water Resources Management around which a preliminary hierarchical vocabulary has been created. One of the aims of GEOSS is to implement a proper system of Earth monitoring and to render information deriving from this process available to a global range of users. Currently, the hierarchical vocabulary structuring these societal benefit categories and their subcategories are available only in English. However, translations have been created for French, Spanish and Italian versions by Claudia Cialone and Kristin Stock of the Centre for Geospatial Science (CGS) at the University of Nottingham, UK, with input from a number of people from the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR) in Italy, the University of Zaragoza and the European Union Joint Research Centre (JRC). Translations have also been accomplished for a Slovenian version of the SBAs by the Biotehnical faculty of the University of Ljubljana, SI.