Jean-Yves Le Gall, president of France's CNES space agency, recently travelled to Jakarta to meet Thomas Djamaluddin, Chairman of LAPAN, the Indonesian National Institute of Aeronautics and Space, and Mulyono R. Prabowo, Deputy Director General of BMKG, the Indonesian Agency for Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics.

The objective of these meetings was to step up the long-standing dialogue between CNES and the two Indonesian bodies in order to advance current areas of cooperation, particularly in the field of climate actions.

In 2017, CNES and LAPAN signed a five-year framework cooperation agreement to give new momentum to space cooperation between the two nation, leading to the supply by CNES of its Integrated Design Model (IDM) software and associated training. Discussions with BMKG focused chiefly on the status of Indonesia’s Maritime Meteorological System (MMS).

Le Gall discussed with CNES’s Indonesian partners the agency’s commitment and that of numerous international partners to tackling climate change, and the launch in December last year of the Space Climate Observatory (SCO) at the One Planet Summit.

The SCO is an international initiative combining satellite and in-situ data with modelling capabilities to better understand and gauge the impacts of climate change globally and locally, with a view to informing decisions and mitigation and coping strategies.