Biography | Bruno Oberle — The CICG Morning He Opened GEO's Second Decade

Earth-observation summits are easy to file as scientist meetings.

On 17 January 2014 the host in the hall was Switzerland's environment state secretary.

The Group on Earth Observations held its tenth plenary and a ministerial summit at the Centre International de Conférences de Genève, at 17 Rue de Varembé.

The week ran from 13 to 17 January.

Delegates from GEO's member governments and participating organizations came to decide whether the open-data mandate would continue past 2015.

Oberle opened the Friday ministerial.

IISD's daily coverage records him welcoming the room and stating that the gathering would decide GEO's next decade.

The summit closed at 16:51.

The mandate was extended.

Rama's photographs of Oberle, timestamped 17 January 2014 at 10:03, were taken in this building during that week.

He was still BAFU director and Switzerland's environment state secretary.

The photographs show him in a dark suit and red tie, speaking, not touring the exhibition floor.

The Geneva week sits between the 2006 merger of the federal office and the 2015 move to EPFL.

It is the public date when the Swiss environment secretary stood in an international hall and the cameras were on him.

The CICG is a ten-minute walk from Place des Nations.

The entrance hall still faces the same glass and concrete columns.

Photo: Mourad Ben Abdallah, CICG entrance hall, 7 September 2024, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Rama, Bruno Oberle at GEO-X, 17 January 2014, CC BY-SA 2.0 FR, via Wikimedia Commons.