Towards a national geo-platform

The Dutch earth sciences is a strong but dispersed community, including universities, knowledge institutes, citizen scientists and industries. In times of climate change and the transition to sustainable and renewable energy, the role of earth sciences is also changing: our discipline provides solutions towards a sustainable society. However, the fragmentation of the field in the Netherlands hampers our societal role. By combining the forces of different Dutch earth sciences partners, we aim to develop a joint national online geo-platform where we share our data and knowledge and inform, and especially engage with, a wide target audience who can benefit from such a joint portal. This target audience may include (local) governments, the private sector, knowledge institutes, universities, and schools. The latter are important to educate children and students and make them familiar and enthusiastic with (the importance and prospects of) earth sciences. In the workshop, we want to explore with you (geo-related) needs and questions of a number of target audiences, and challenge you to come up with strong messages we want to convey. Together, we would like to formulate mottos and messages to ensure our national geological initiative will connect to the target audiences, thereby increasing the role of earth scientists in the Netherlands towards the sustainable society of the future.