Held every three years, ESA’s Living Planet Symposia are among the world’s premier events on Earth observation. The symposia continue to expand in both size and scope. With the climate crisis intensifying, the Living Planet Symposium 2025 (LPS25) emphasised transitioning from ‘observation to climate action and sustainability for Earth’. In 2025, the event was held between 22nd-27th June in Vienna, Austria. During the conference, ESA welcomed 6900 participants from 125 countries.
CMIP had a strong presence at LPS25, with ESA as the host of the CMIP IPO. Three members of the CMIP IPO attended the meeting, alongside CMIP Panel co-chair, Helene Hewitt. CMIP chaired a session alongside the ESMO IPO titled ‘Advances at the observation-modelling interface’, which featured presentations on the role of observations in climate forcings, observational requirements for model benchmarking, and emerging technologies in Earth system modelling.
Alongside this session, the CMIP IPO also organised and facilitated two Agora sessions. The first featured a panel discussion on how to delivery sustained mode climate forcings, and particularly focused on the role of Earth observations within that problem. The second Agora continued to focus on the critical role of Earth Observations within the modelling community, this time putting the spotlight on climate model evaluation and benchmarking. Presentations during the Agora provided an overview of the Rapid Evaluation Framework, observation requirements of model evaluation, how to participate in community model diagnostics and performance metric packages, and finally Dóra Hegedüs gave a demonstration on how to get observational datasets ‘REF-ready’.
The CMIP and ESMO IPOs and WCRP Secretariat also hosted daily drop-in sessions alongside our activity members, boosting our engagement across the conference significantly.
Finally, the conference featured a number of plenary panel discussions on cross-cutting themes. One of these discussions, titled ‘The global crisis and Earth action: understanding our planet’, featured Helene Hewitt. The discussion explored how we understand our planet using climate models and observations. The panellists discussed the role of climate forcings, Earth observations, and high-resolution modelling in addition to sharing their insights from their work in global collaborations, including in the IPCC, WCRP, GCOS, and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre.
