Switzerland

Distinguished Co-chairs and delegates,

Esteemed Director of the GEO Secretariat,

Colleagues and friends of the GEO community,

We thank South Africa for hosting and the GEO Secretariat for their commitment to make GEO week a reality, here in Cape Town. At the outset and most importantly, Switzerland reaffirms its strong interest and participation in GEO and GEOSS. We also reiterate our strong support for the Secretariat in Geneva, which enjoys a fertile environment for GEO's mission with a large number of international organisations relevant to GEO's Societal Benefit Areas.

Following the content of the Ministerial Declaration, foreseen to be adopted this week, Switzerland strongly favors and supports environmental data that is scientifically sound and freely accessible to and ready to use for all different stakeholders. In that spirit the Swiss government has taken a number of measures, among which we highlight:

The introduction of a law that facilitates the Use of Electronic Means for the Fulfilment of Government Tasks. It is the basis for the royalty-free licensing of software – that means open source software. For the publication of data from Swiss administration there is free use – this means open government data. The law has two main aims:

• One, the provision and use of information and communications technology resources by federal authorities, and
• Two, the definition of standards by the federal government like requirements for interoperability.

A potential use case could be an application that warns about harmful environmental effects. The application would have been developed by the Federal Office for Environment and would be fed by environmental data hosted by several authorities offices. The source code of the software is free at disposition. Potential users can further develop the application in order to optimize it to their needs and they have free access to data to run the application.

As part of the national GEO coordination, Swiss institutions are encouraged to participate in GEO, GEOSS and EuroGEO. This effort is ultimately reflected in the broad range of participation of Swiss institutions in GEO WP activities in the areas of mountains, biodiversity, health, green economic recovery, and nature-based solutions in accordance with the GEO priorities.

As a government, we see our role in GEO as providing and enabling an environment for authorities, academia, the private sector, civil society and policy makers to access, use and benefit from Earth observation derived services. As such, Switzerland aims to ensure inter-institutional collaboration and cooperation with the country's universities and small and medium-sized enterprises, which will foster high-quality data, services and knowledge as well as technological advances that meet users' needs.