Preface
The first Joint Action Plan was signed at the 44th Directive Council of the Pan American Institute of Geography and History (PAIGH) in Buenos Aires (Argentina) in 2012. It was elaborated in a coordinated and effective manner by PAIGH, SIRGAS, CP-IDEA, and GEOSUR. The objective of this first initiative focused on strengthening, harmonizing, and accelerating the development of the Americas Spatial Data Infrastructure.
In 2015, this Plan was updated with a vision to 2020, incorporating some efforts to build the Integrated Map of Central America (MIAC) and prepare the Integrated Map of South America (MIAS).
The second version of the Joint Action Plan was carried out in the Sixth Session of the UN-GGIM Expert Committee held in New York in 2016. As an update of the second version, we considered the Aguascalientes Declaration, signed on the 18th of September 2020. The Declaration stated that the regional organizations in the Americas should work together to define further joint work strategies and programs to mutually advance regional integration to build a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) composed of diverse information resources, such as Earth Observations (EO), geographic, statistical and other thematic information (hereafter referred to as geospatial data).
This Joint Action plan was developed through contributions of the Member States of regional organizations, such as the PAIGH, the United Nations Regional Committee on Global Geospatial Information Management for the Americas (UN-GGIM: Americas), AmeriGEO, the Central American Integration System (SICA), the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), the Geocentric Reference System for the Americas (SIRGAS), the Latin American Cooperation of Advanced Networks (RedCLARA) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). The document sections were designed to address the dimensions of the implementation of the aforementioned Declaration and align to the three founded working groups:
1. Capacity Development (CD),
2. Communication, Cooperation, and Coordination (CCC),
3. Data, Information, and Knowledge Sharing (DIKS).
This input from the three working groups is consolidated in this document, called the “Joint Action Plan: Outcomes of the Aguascalientes Declaration”.
This Joint Action Plan welcomes the contribution of resources and critical competencies that these stakeholders may provide to strengthen capacities essential for integrating the broad panoply of regional data to promote informed, data-driven, evidence-based decision-making and support national development in the countries and territories of the Americas.