In response to the Australian Government’s 2018 announcement of ongoing commitment to NCRIS and the 2018 Decadal Plan for Australian Geoscience, AuScope is developing a 10-Year Strategic Plan and 5-Year Investment Plan to meet national geoscience challenges coming decade.

Since late 2018, we have conducted an independent review of our programs, engaged the national geoscience community in a strategy workshop, and established working groups to develop draft proposals for future investments.

Now, we have a Draft 10-Year Strategic Plan and a Draft 5-Year Investment Plans for your review ahead of delivering final version to the Australian Government in 2020.

Stage 1: Independent Review, 2018

In 2018 the AuScope Board recommended that an independent review of existing AuScope programs be undertaken in order to:

• Provide feedback to current projects regarding strengths and weaknesses,

• Inform future program funding decisions, and

• Provide a foundation for development of future strategy and investment plans,

The review panel comprised Prof Neil Williams (Chair), Prof Anya Reading, Prof Peter Betts and Prof Matt King. We will make the review available in early 2019.

Stage 2: Strategy Workshop, 2018

Following a week of ‘big ideas’ at the AGCC 2018 in Adelaide in October, we gathered with 100 geoscientists from across the country over two days to discuss how we can work together, and what tools, data and analytics that we need to tackle national geoscience challenges of the coming decade.

With the Australian Academy of Science’s recent 2018 Decadal Plan for Geoscience in mind, researchers from geoscience, environmental, climate, atmospheric and data science communities started the workshop by ‘thinking big’ about national challenges like natural resources security and sustainability, geohazards and working with and preserving big research data.

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If you would like to participate in, or hear about the investment plan when it becomes available, please sign up here.

Stage 3: Three infrastructure workshops, 2019

Our next stage of our investment planning process involved developing investment ideas and building pitches with the community for investment in field, laboratory and digital areas. We ran three workshops in Canberra and Melbourne to:

• Recap the national geoscience challenges, the NCRIS funding opportunity and key 2018 Strategy Workshop themes: ‘4D Australia’, ‘observations’, and ‘data assimilation’.

• Identify gaps in national research infrastructure and prioritise needs.

• Build and test rationale for identified priority needs.

• Establish working groups that will formalise submissions to AuScope between May — June.

We now (April) work to consolidate findings in these workshops, and start the working group process for Stage 4.

Stage 4: Building proposals, 2019

Key representatives from Stage 3 will then develop proposals around field, laboratory and digital infrastructure. AuScope will support the community in refining these proposals, and drawing them into a draft investment plan format by June 2019.

Stage 5: Building the plans, 2019 — 2020

AuScope Management have generated a Draft 10-Year Strategic Plan and Draft 5-Year Investment Plan that is being distributed widely amongst Australia’s geoscience community in March 2020.

If you would like to be notified about the draft plans and are not already on our mailing list, please sign up.