Organiser(s): The Committee on Data of the International Science Council (CODATA)

Solving today's global grand challenges demands that science and policy embrace data innovations, synergies, and multi-stakeholder partnerships. Therefore, the International Science Council, acting as the global voice for science, is launching the CODATA Decadal Programme; Making Data Work for Cross-Domain Grand Challenges, and seeks the collaboration of UN partners and other stakeholders in this initiative. The Programme will build the international communities of practice needed to enhance and harmonise digital and data capacity across science and policy, and mutually reinforce one another's ability to respond to emerging opportunities and threats. The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated both the power of data-driven science-policy dialogues and exchanges, and also the need for improvement to face future challenges as a global community. Creating a two-way, digital bridge between scientific research and official monitoring is vital to enable scientifically grounded policy, and translation of society's needs to science. New techniques for data mobility; getting the data when and where needed; and analysis that leverage huge amounts of data and information, from both traditional and new sources, are revolutionising this space. This session builds on one with the same title in the 2020 virtual forum. As well as showcasing and discussing progress with the objectives described, it also features new speakers from related initiatives. New developments include 1) the UN Data Standards for United Nations system-wide reporting of financial data (the;Data Cube;) work in the context of the Oceans Decade on SDGs to develop and harmonise ontologies to bridge between a number of UN Agencies. Updates include 3) the finalisation and publication of the UNDRR-ISC Hazard Information Profiles, and the governance, maintenance and technical presentation of this resource; and 4) the innovative new work of the ALPHA network, as part of an IRDC project, to combine demographic, health and clinical data for COVID-19, and to provide an ML-enhanced dashboard and visualisations for policy makers. The session will conclude with a presentation on progress in good practice https://fairvocabularies.github.io/ and harmonisation of semantic products (vocabularies, ontologies, metadata profiles): the multi-stakeholder bridges needed to make data work.