Planetary Skin Institute

The Planetary Skin Institute (PSI) is a new organization that embodies the spirit of cooperation and open collaboration between public, private, NGO and academic sectors required to address the global challenges arising from climate change.

The transition to a low carbon economy will require a vast array of small and large decisions made by a range of governments, corporations, communities and other stakeholders. But currently they are forced to make these with only very partial information. To unlock reliable, scaleable, open participatory mechanisms to achieve trust and informed decision making we need to pool the assets and capabilities of researchers in public and private sectors, leading space agencies, NGOs, think tanks, academia and international scientific institutions. No single institution has the capabilities, assets or know-how to complete the R&D program. So national and international collaboration across sectors and disciplines is key.

PSI will research, develop and prototype an approach to provide near-to-real-time global monitoring of environmental conditions and changes. This will deliver the required decision support capabilities to manage global resources, risks and build environmental markets.

While the PSI is enabled to a great extent by advances in the technology – space, communication, computation and collaboration among them – that can deliver real-time global monitoring; human interaction and collaboration is the real engine of the programme. The coming together of opinion and willingness to act across many sectors has pushed the Planetary Skin Institute from a conceptual model towards a prototype and will secure its progress onwards to global implementation and replication. PSI places people, their energy, inventiveness and creativity at the heart of the research and development agenda. The PSI Global Advisory Council is made up from leading figures from all relevant areas of the PSI R & D programme.