Supporting cross-domain system-level environmental and earth science

Answering the key challenges for society due to environmental issues like climate change, pollution and loss of biodiversity, and making the right decisions to tackle these in a cost-efficient and sustainable way requires scientific understanding of the Earth System. This scientific knowledge can then be used to inform the general public and policymakers. Scientific understanding starts with having available the right data, often in the form of observations. Research Infrastructures (RIs) exist to perform these observations in the required quality and to make the data available to first of all the researchers. In the current Big Data era, the increasing challenge is to provide the data in an interoperable and machine-readable and understandable form. The European RIs on environment formed a project cluster called ENVRI that tackles these issues. In this chapter, we introduce the societal relevance of the environmental data produced by the RIs and discuss the issues at hand in providing the relevant data according to the so-called FAIR principles.