The global community is investing heavily in Earth observation and Essential Climate Variable data production, yet the pathway from raw observation to actionable climate service remains broken. Data chains are fragmented, access infrastructures are proliferating without coordination, and the gap between what scientists produce and what decision-makers can use persists despite significant public investment. At the same time, private sector dominance over data access, slow institutional adaptation, and the unresolved question of how AI and commercial actors fit into a historically public system have introduced new pressures that are global, not merely European.

iClimateAction is an EU Horizon Europe project bringing together GEO, WMO, and GCOS to address this fragmentation directly - harmonising ECV data chains and demonstrating the science-to-services pathway through two live demonstrators: urban heat resilience and ecosystem extent mapping. The GEO-21 Symposium is the opportunity to widen this conversation and engage the broader community on what it will actually take to complete the journey from observation to service.

The session runs for 75 minutes across two segments. Senior leaders from GEO, WMO, and the European Commission open with brief strategic remarks on their organisations' priorities and the science-to-services imperative. A moderated expert panel then takes on the central provocation: we are gathering more Earth observation data than ever before - so why is the journey to climate services still so difficult? Panellists are drawn from CEOS, the European Commission, the AI and data infrastructure community, the private sector, and other internationally focused voices.

The session closes with a forward-looking segment on iClimateAction's next phase and an open invitation to engage.

Segment 1 - High-Level Opening (Yana Gevorgyan, Véronique Bouchet, Joanna Drake)

Segment 2 - Panel Discussion with Integrated Audience Participation (Moderator: Paolo Laj)