There are simultaneous crises across the planet due to rising CO2 emissions, rapid biodiversity loss, and desertification. Assessing progress on these complex and interlocking issues requires a global view on the effectiveness of our adaptations and mitigations. To succeed in the coming decades, we need a wealth of new data about our natural environment that we rapidly process into accurate indicators, with sufficient trust in the resulting insights to make decisions that affect the lives of billions of people worldwide.

However, programming the computer systems required to effectively ingest, clean, collate, process, explore, archive, and derive policy decisions from the planetary data we are collecting is difficult and leads to artefacts presently not usable by non-CS-experts, not reliable enough for scientific and political decision making, and not widely and openly available to all interested parties. Concurrently, domains where computational techniques are already central (e.g., climate modelling) are facing diminishing returns from current hardware trends and software techniques.

PROPL explores how to close the gap between state-of-the-art programming methods being developed in academia and the use of programming in climate analysis, modelling, forecasting, policy, and diplomacy. The aim is to build bridges to the current practices used in the scientific community.

We therefore invite you to submit a provocation that proposes and outlines a problem, application area, challenge, or capacity gap, that might be addressable by members of the PROPL community. We especially welcome such contributions from domain experts outside computer science. We take an expansive view on what a provocation is: a sentence or two about a problem domain and a link to an example is fine, or a longer view that might even form a short paper for the workshop. Mainly, we'd like to hear from practitioners about your opinions about the barriers you're finding from computer science, so that we can get to fixing them!