International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation

Group on Earth Observations – GEO Week 2020

Statement of ITC / UTwente, The Netherlands

ITC acts as a knowledge hub since its inception in 1950. ITC has developed a broad global network of 20.000 alumni and strategic partnerships, and it wants to continue to actively pursue and elaborate our international partnerships within our knowledge domains.

In general, many partnerships have already been established in the fields of education, research and other capacity development activities – in fact ITC is an established brand name when it comes to its mandate for organizational capacity development.  ITC has a mission and a mandate for capacity development issued by the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs. With some 200 staff and 150 PhD candidates it is unique institution in size and focus worldwide.

For ITC, capacity development implies building capacity through education, research and institutional strengthening in 4 main domains; GeoHealth, GeoAI, Resource Security, Disaster Resilience.

The ambition of ITC is to expand its reputation as a center of excellence and knowledge exchange hub in its thematic domain. This requires ITC to play an internationally recognized leading and coordinating role both globally and regionally. Our intention is to organize this together with other supra-national regional partners and within the context of GEO.

ITC works on SDG’s, the Paris Agreement and the Sendai Framework and is an active participating organization in GEO. We wish to align our GEO connection with other main players in our field. Examples include space agencies in both the Northern world and the Southern world as well as geospatial organizations and relevant universities. To ensure greater sustainability of such collaboration networks and the continuity of activities, we will attempt to establish long-term agreements and collaborations with major funding agencies and national governments.

The ultimate goal for earth observation the coming years should be to focus on the ‘last mile’; bringing earth observation products to the end user and foster the development of local earth observation markets and business cases. ITC is committed to contribute to this and our support to GEO’s Capacity Development Working Group and GEO’s Work programme activities confirms this commitment.