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 building the International Centre for Earth Simulation (ICES) and 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, visualization and AI/ML tools that accurately depict the medium and long term future direction of planet Earth with good accuaracy.

ICES is a project for the common good that provides enhanced decision support and improved scientific underpinnings to our current and future policy makers, especially with respect to the effects of climate change, global warming, extreme weather, wildfires, ocean acidification, geoengineering, resource depletion, fresh water availability, food security, energy security, public health & safety, earthquake, tsunami, landslide, volcanic eruption and all relevant early warning, hazard reduction and mitigation activities.

The ICES Foundation has been formed as a Public-Private-Partnership and actively seeks close cooperation between multiple domains of society: government, academia, industry, NGOs, and the diversity of public and private enterprise. It confidently expects to see similar organizations formed in the decades ahead as the problems listed above reach critical level in many countries, threatening national security, economic survival, and even loss of territory.  As a thought leader in the field, the ICES Foundation will cooperate with the planning and operation of local efforts, as required, to form not-for-profit regional integration centers. 

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 drawing from multiple scientific and social disciplines. Indeed, the ICES mission will require cooperation with a large number of specialized institutes and research bodies throughout the world, including cooperation with the global 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 a powerful computing and visualization center, and to dedicate the facility to the furtherance of Earth System Science, especially as it relates to the needs of our modern society. Until this time, ICES will take advantage of pay-as-you-go high-performance cloud computing facilities as they develop from various suppliers.

In cooperation with its partners, ICES will also spawn projects in well chosen locations as evidence to society of the value of holistically integrated scientific thinking. To date, such special activity has involved the launching of iCREST Foundation, an independent US 501(c)3 entity aiming to bring high schoolers closer to the concept of resilience and sustainability in their local surroundings. 

Currently, the ICES Foundation operates QLARM - an earthquake loss estimate service which provides pro bono alerts estimating numbers of fatalities and injured to first responders, civil defense and governments within an hour following serious earthquakes anywhere on the planet. The QLARM team has also published fatality scenarios for likely future earthquakes in populated areas, has analyzed the history of earthquake fatalities and, in recent publications, introduced new parameters to measure their impact on affected countries. 

The ICES Foundation also convenes in Geneva a Biennial Workshop aimed at Modelling the Whole Earth System - a challenge whose time has come. In addition, the Foundation curates this large multi-science Internet website with over 30,000 curated insightful links.

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

The National Research Council, Washington DC, USA, November 19, 2009
Stanford University, MediaX, California, USA, November 24, 2009
CERN, Geneva, January 29, 2010
CC-IN2P3, Lyon, France, March 3, 2010
ICSU Belmont Project, Paris, France, March 9, 2010
ECMWF, Reading, UK, March 17, 2010
James Martin 21 Century  School, University of Oxford, UK, March18, 2010
Hadley Centre, UK Met Office, Exeter, UK, March 19, 2010
Beyond Copenhagen Conference, Chapman University, California, USA, April 22, 2010
Earth Systems Simulation & Visualization Roundtable, Santa Cruz, California, USA, May 5, 2010
Climate Research Centre, DKRZ & MPI-M Hamburg, Germany, May 12, 2010
WMO Information Systems (WIS) Workshop, Geneva, Switzerland, May 17 2010
ETHZ Extreme Weather Conference, Schaffhausen, Switzerland, June 7, 2010
Laboratoire de Meteorologie Dynamique, IPSL, Paris, France, June 10, 2010
GEO Grid Meeting, WMO Geneva, Switzerland, June 24, 2010
Swiss State Secretariat for Education & Research, Berne, Switzerland, August 30, 2010
European Meteorological Society 10th Annual Meeting, Zurich, Switzerland, September 12, 2010
IGES and the Centre for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies, Maryland, USA, Sept 17, 2010
World Resources Simulation Center, San Diego, USA, Sept 20, 2010
Ministry of Science, Technology & Innovation (MOSTI), Putrajaya, Malaysia, Oct 8, 2010
ASPERA 'From the Geosphere to the Cosmos', Paris, Dec 1~2, 2010
New Blue Earth Roundtable, Chateau de Bossey, Geneva, Dec 6~7, 2010
American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, San Francisco, Dec 13~17, 2010
European Geophysical Union, Vienna, Austria, April 4-8, 2011
Expert Workshop, SEEVCC/RHMSS, Belgrade, April 11~13, 2011
Bainbridge Graduate Institute, Seattle, May 3rd, 2011
The 3rd Sustainable Development Forum, Deyang, China, May 12~14, 2011
The Burlamaqui Club, Geneva, June 28, 2011
Global Governance of Energy and the Environment, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, August 10, 2011
7th International Symposium on Digital Earth, Perth, Australia, August 23-25, 2011
4th Atmospheric Circulation Reconstruction over the Earth (ACRE) Workshop, De Bilt, Holland, Sept 21~23, 2011
The BRICS Countries/Climate Change Roundatable, Geneva, Switzerland, October 13, 2011
NASA Ames Research Center, Mountain View, California, October 20, 2011
WCRP Open Science Conference/Poster Session, Denver, Colorado, USA. October 24~28, 2011
Euresearch, Bern, Switzerland. November 7, 2011
IBM Research, Rueschlikon, Switzerland. November 9th, 2011 
'Modelling the Whole Earth System I - a challenge whose time has come', Geneva, 22 November 2011
AAAS Annual Meeting, Vancouver, 16~20 February 2012
AGU Science Policy Conference, Washington DC, USA, 1~2 May, 2012
University of Texas, Austin, USA, 4 May, 2012
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA, 8 August 2012
NASA Ames Research Center, Mountain View, California, USA, 10 August 2012
EU Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy, 10 September 2012
TEDx, University of Warwick, UK, 8 March 2013
GoVirtual HPC Conference, Gothenburg, Sweden, 12 March 2013
GoVirtual HPC Conference, Copenhagen, Denmark, 14 March 2013
Stochastic Modelling for Weather & Climate Prediction, University of Oxford, UK, 18~21 March 2013
Shanghai Advanced Research Institute, Shanghai, China, 14 May 2013
National Earthquake Administration, Beijing, China, 15 May 2013
National Admin of Surveying, Mapping & Geoinformation, Beijing, China, 16 May 2013
China University for Mining and Technology, Beijing, China, 17 May 2013
Future in Review Conference, Laguna, California, 22 May 2013
West Summit 2013, Solutions for Planetary Sustainability, NASA Ames, Mountain View, CA, 23 May 2013
Google Inc, Mountain View, California, 28 May 2013
Cascadia Resiliience Center opening reception, Seattle, 31 May 2013
Perspectives on Computational Science, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 4 October 2013
'Modelling the Whole Earth System II - a challenge whose time has come!', Geneva, 12 November 2013
The 10th Swiss Biennial on Science, Technics + Aesthetics, Luzern, 18-19 January 2014
Integrating the Interconnected, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, 24 January 2014
Integrating the Interconnected, The Hub, Pioneer Square, Seattle, 6 February 2014
Building a Virtual Earth to better understand the real world, Swiss Embassy, Paris, 29 April 2014
Geospatial World Forum, Geneva, Switzerland, 8 May 2014
Future in Review, Dana Point, California, 23 May 2014
The Experts Network, Geneva, Switzerland, 2 July 2014
CERN 60th Anniversary, From Physics to Daily Life, Geneva, Switzerland, 24 September 2014
Sustainable Seattle, The PNW Resilience Challenge Summit, Seattle, USA, 2 October 2014
State Key Lab of Numerical Modeling for Atmosheric Sciences, IAP, China Academy of Sciences 28 May 2015
State Key Lab of Tropical Oceanography, South China Sea Institute of Oceanography, CAS, 1 June 2015
Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology (SIAT), Chinese Academy of Sciences, 2 June 2015
Pivotal Geospatial Conference, Queensland Univesity of Technology, Brisbane, Australia, 29 June 2015 
IEEE eScience Workshop, Europe Plan-E, LMU Munich, Germany, 3 September 2015
'Modelling the Whole Earth System III - a challenge whose time has come!', Geneva, 6 November 2015
Earthquakes, Tsunamis, Volcanoes - rising to risks in Cascadia, Seattle Town Hall, 3 December 2015
UNISDR Science & Technology Conference - poster sessions, Geneva, 27-29 January 2016
The Experts Network, 'Humans & Humanoids: an emerging partnership', Geneva, 7 December 2016
FONGIT incubator, The Future of Computing, Robotics and AI, Geneva, 29 March 2017
World Summit on the Information Society, turning targets into action (WSIS Forum), Geneva, June 12 2017
Monsoons in a changing climate, ICTP, Trieste, Italy, 31 July  2017
iCREST Education Summit, Harvard School of Graduate Education, Boston, September 27-28, 2017
ICES Biennial Workshop IV, Modelling the Whole Earth System, Geneva, December 4-5, 2017
Big Earth Data workshop, EC-Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy, March 7, 2018
Supercomputing Frontiers Europe, Warsaw, Poland, 12-15 March, 2018
Internal seminar, Lockheed Martin Solar & Asytpphysics Lab, 11 July 2019
Future in REsearch (FiRE) virtual conference, 27 May 2021


 

Copyright (C) 2010-2023 ICES Foundation - all rights reserved

Above is a digital montage created by Tony and Bonnie DeVarco for the ICES Foundation with use of satellite imagery courtesy of NASA’s Earth Observatory. The inset diagram is a simplified version of the Tree of Life, showing common names of the major groups. This version of the tree is based on the Tree of Life appendix in Life: The Science of Biology, 8th ed., by D. Sadava, H. C. Heller, G. H. Orians, W. K. Purves, and D. M. Hillis (Sinauer Associates and W. H. Freeman, 2008). Other insets include the Sun Dagger and the Analemma. The constellation Pleiades peeks through in the background.