ICES Foundation

The ICES Foundation is an independent, non-political and non-commercial Geneva-based Swiss Foundation that was created in the month of January 2010 for the purpose of attracting finances to build and operate a Swiss-based International Centre for Earth Simulation (ICES), and to build a global network of partner activities to support it.

The mission of ICES is to integrate the vast pools of knowledge contained within today's multitude of scientific and socio-economic specializations and to develop next generation 'holistic' modeling, simulation and visualizations that accurately depict the medium and long term future direction of planet Earth.

ICES is a project for the common good that will provide enhanced decision support and improved scientific underpinnings to our current and future policy makers, especially with respect to the effects of climate change, extreme weather, geoengineering, resource depletion, fresh water availability, food security, public health & safety, earthquake, tsunami, landslide, volcanic and other hazard reduction and mitigation.

The ICES Foundation has been formed as a Public-Private-Partnership and will actively seek close cooperation between multiple domains of society: government, academia, industry, NGOs, and all public and private enterprise.

This ambitious project is expected to take decades to fully achieve its mission and will require innovative breakthroughs from a core group of active professionals working in close proximity and drawn from multiple scientific and social disciplines. In addition, the ICES mission will require cooperation with a large number of specialized institutes and research bodies throughout the world, including with the Citizen Science movement in general.

Acting as a work platform for the program, and as soon as financing allows, the ICES project is planning to install and operate one of the ten most powerful computing and advanced visualization centers in the world, and to dedicate the facility to the furtherance of Earth System Science, especially as it relates to our modern society. Until this time, ICES will take advantage of pay-as-you-go high-performance cloud computing facilities as they are progressively developed and become available from various suppliers.

In cooperation with its partners, ICES will also spawn several 'proof of concept' projects in well chosen locations as evidence to society of the value of holistically integrated scientific resources and models. The very first such project underway is the Cascadian Resilience Center (CSC), based in Seattle and focused on the Pacific NW region of North America. The second project being formulated is The Himalaya Project , recently joined by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, State Key Laboratory of Numerical Modeling for Atmospheric Sciences and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics. And the third special activity underway is the formation of the iCREST Education Advisory Board.

Currently, the ICES Foundation operates QLARM - an earthquake loss estimate service which provides pro bono alerts and loss estimates to first responders, civil defense and governments within an hour following serious earthquake events at any point on the planet. It also convenes in Geneva a Biennial Workshop aimed at Modelling the Whole Earth System- a challenge whose time has come, and curates this large multi-science website.

As a Swiss Foundation, the ICES Foundation is under the jurisdiction of the Swiss Confederation's Department of Interior (DFI), and has elected the international companies of Pricewaterhouse Coopers and UBS as its auditor and its banker, respectively.

The fundamental concepts contained within the ICES project have been presented and vetted with over 60 leading organizations and conference forums in the last 10 years, including: