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Work Assignment 1: Guiding Principles ​

Version: 6.3
Date: 22 September 2026
Prepared by: Ben Wortley, Lead Consultant — UN-GGCE
Reference: Terms of Reference 2 (ToR2) — Work Assignment 1

Full version history and changelog available on request.

Audience ​

This document serves two readerships: (1) UN-GGCE leadership and technical counterparts already familiar with this engagement; and (2) UN-GGCE staff and Member State stakeholders new to this specific analysis. Readers new to the engagement should read this Purpose & Reading Guide; the six principles that follow provide the full detail underlying its conclusions.

Purpose & Reading Guide ​

This document is Work Assignment 1 of the UN-GGCE Global Geodesy Supply Chain Assessment (Terms of Reference 2, or "ToR2"). It sets out six guiding principles for the global geodesy supply chain, drawn from existing international frameworks. Read this document first if you are new to the engagement — every other Work Assignment applies the six principles defined here.

ToR2 builds directly on the consultancy that came before it (Terms of Reference 1, "ToR1," March–September 2025), which built the 58-capability model and ran the PPTD maturity assessment published as the State of Geodesy 2026 report[^sog2026]. This document, and everything built on it, uses that published baseline directly.

These principles do two things. First, they define the standard Member States can reasonably be asked to meet now — the floor every critical function is tested against, and how that determination is made (explained below). Second, they become a scoring method in the Investment Prioritisation and Risk Rubric, and get applied to real products in the Critical Product Mapping Report (Work Assignment 2) and the Risk Assessment and Gap Analysis (Work Assignment 3).

Companion Documents ​

  • Work Assignment 1 Appendix — EGV Data Levels and Supply Chain Functions: defines the data-level and function terminology used throughout the Investment Prioritisation and Risk Rubric and Work Assignment 2.
  • Investment Prioritisation and Risk Rubric: converts the six principles below into a consistent, quantitative risk-scoring method.
  • Work Assignment 2 — Critical Product Mapping Report: applies these principles to the five critical geodetic product workflows.
  • State of Geodesy 2026[^sog2026]: the capability maturity baseline this assessment scores against, and the source of the Level 5 "robust" definition this document's robustness framing is built on.
  • Zero Draft of a Robust Global Geodesy Supply Chain (15 April 2026)[^zerodraft]: UN-GGCE's reference architecture for the Robust destination — station/centre counts, governance structure, and rough-order-of-magnitude cost.

Key Terms and Abbreviations ​

AbbreviationWhat it means
EGVEssential Geodetic Variable — a specific measurement (like a satellite's position, or the shape of the Earth) that geodesy produces and shares globally
FAIRFindable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable — the data principles this assessment measures data practices against
GGOSGlobal Geodetic Observing System — the international science body that coordinates geodesy and defines EGVs
GNSSGlobal Navigation Satellite Systems — satellite networks (like GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, BeiDou) that provide global positioning and timing
IAGInternational Association of Geodesy — the scientific society for the field of geodesy
IGIFIntegrated Geospatial Information Framework — a UN framework guiding how countries manage geospatial information
ITRFInternational Terrestrial Reference Frame — the global coordinate system used to state exact positions on Earth
JDP1st Joint Development Plan for Global Geodesy — UN-GGCE's agreed roadmap of improvement actions
PPTDPeople, Process, Technology, Data — the four dimensions this assessment scores every capability against
RINEX / SINEXStandard data formats used to exchange GNSS observation and solution data between institutions
SLAService Level Agreement — a formal commitment to a specific standard of service
UN-GGCEUnited Nations Global Geodetic Centre of Excellence
WIGOSWMO Integrated Global Observing System — WMO's global network of weather and climate observing stations
WMOWorld Meteorological Organization — the UN agency for weather, climate, and water

Executive Summary ​

UN-GGCE's mandate is to "avoid further degradation" of the global geodesy supply chain. To act on that, it has developed a set of six guiding principles that define what robustness means structurally, tested product by product against the target architecture set out in the Zero Draft of a Robust Global Geodesy Supply Chain (15 April 2026).

These principles draw on frameworks the international community already uses — the UN-GGIM Integrated Geospatial Information Framework (IGIF), the WMO Unified Data Policy, and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction — and they address the immediate risks threatening the steady delivery of critical geodetic products.

These principles are the basis for reviewing how products are currently delivered, and for defining what structural changes are needed in simple terms that can be understood by a broad stakeholder group — across People, Process, Technology, and Data (PPTD), consistent with the State of Geodesy report.

What "Robust" Means in This Assessment ​

A geodetic product is robust when it can continue to be delivered to agreed accuracy, integrity, availability and timeliness requirements despite specified credible disruptions. Robustness doesn't mean nothing can fail, or that every element has an identical duplicate — the appropriate resilience strategy is determined function by function, and may involve geographic distribution, redundancy, replication, transferability, or the enhanced protection of a capability that can't sensibly be duplicated. Robustness is determined separately for each product: there is no single global robustness score, and none of the measures in this assessment are combined into one figure. The State of Geodesy 2026 defines a separate Level 5 for each of its four PPTD dimensions rather than one scale-wide definition; Technology's Level 5, "Strategic," is the clearest illustration of the aspiration: a network "proactively supported, optimised for scalability, and is usable for innovation." The report's own evidence for why this is still aspirational concentrates in its lowest-scoring capability, Model of the Global Geodesy Supply Chain (average 1.0), which repeats across its own evidence: "there is no design of what a mature and robust network for a GGSC looks like." Closing that gap is this engagement's purpose.

The Zero Draft of a Robust Global Geodesy Supply Chain (15 April 2026) is UN-GGCE's first attempt at that design. It sets out a fully-resourced target: specific numbers of stations, data centres, and analysis/combination centres per region, plus a formal governance structure — a Plenary, Executive Council, and Secretariat. The estimated cost is roughly US$165 million a year. Current funding is roughly US$70–106 million a year — a shortfall of about US$100 million.

Each of the six principles below resolves to a floor check: does every capability a function needs reach a workable level, tested capability by capability and dimension by dimension, never as a domain average — Geographic Distribution and Political Resilience use their own dedicated mechanics instead (a direct four-check test of geographic configuration, and a jurisdiction count), each resolving to the same kind of pass/fail threshold (the Investment Prioritisation and Risk Rubric explains why). The floor starts at Level 2 — synthesised from the State of Geodesy report's four PPTD-dimension-specific Level 2 definitions (People "Managed," Process "Repeatable," Technology "Available," Data "Aware"): something exists, but informally and inconsistently. Funding is in-kind rather than committed; processes are followed sometimes, by some people; usable only by specialists who already know how it works; and data quality attributes like timeliness and accuracy aren't yet well defined. Below Level 2, there's nothing to build on; above it, the remaining gap is about quality and consistency. Level 2 is a provisional default: it applies until a function's Technical Product Working Group ratifies the actual required level — using the bottom-up threshold-setting method: establish the observed current baseline, ask how much worse than that would be genuinely unacceptable, stress-test the proposed threshold against a credible disruption scenario, then escalate to the Technical Product Working Group for ratification rather than re-derivation.

Applying all six principles this way to a product yields one of three determinations — never averaged, since a strong result on one principle can't compensate for failing another; each describes a different kind of vulnerability, calling for a different response:

  • Robust — every mandatory requirement is demonstrated, required capability maturity is achieved at every critical function, the required resilience architecture is established and demonstrated, all six principles are satisfied to the extent required, and defined credible disruptions can be absorbed or recovered from without unacceptable interruption.
  • Not Yet Robust — one or more mandatory requirements are unmet, a critical function remains an unacceptable single point of failure, required geographic or political resilience is absent, interoperability or transferability isn't demonstrated, critical capability maturity is insufficient, recovery is inadequate, or a credible disruption causes unacceptable interruption or degradation.
  • Not Yet Robust — Evidence Gap — insufficient evidence is recorded explicitly, rather than defaulted to a pass or a fail. An evidence gap is never evidence of robustness.

How Progress Is Measured ​

Each principle defined below has its own measure, set out in full in the Investment Prioritisation and Risk Rubric.

Required capability levels above the Level 2 provisional default aren't asserted top-down — they're set bottom-up per function, through the threshold-setting method above, and ratified by each product's Technical Product Working Group. Until that ratification happens, each product's standing against the six principles is carried as an asserted view, backed by an explained evidence trail (below) — a starting draft for the Technical Product Working Groups to review and validate, not a locked determination.

The Capability Evidence Trail ​

Every capability score used in this assessment is paired with a classification of how confident the evidence behind it is. Four categories, applied consistently across Work Assignment 2 and its five product annexes:

  • Confirmed — cited at the shared State of Geodesy 2026 baseline, with no product-specific departure asserted. The default state.
  • Asserted — a product-specific numeric departure from that shared baseline, backed by product-specific evidence found during this engagement.
  • Considered and not asserted — real, specific evidence exists that could support a departure from baseline, but wasn't acted on, either because it risks double-counting what the baseline may already reflect, or because it's a genuine judgement call left open for the Technical Product Working Group to resolve.
  • Queued — evidenced somewhere in a product's own workflow annex or governance analysis, but not yet scored in this assessment.

This classification exists so a reader can tell the difference between "this is the generic baseline, unexamined for this product" and "this engagement found specific evidence and made a call" — an honest account of how much independent verification sits behind each number.

Foundational Precedents ​

These principles borrow from frameworks the international community has already agreed to:

  1. UN-GGIM Integrated Geospatial Information Framework (IGIF)[^igif]: says critical geospatial infrastructure shouldn't rely on isolated capabilities — it needs cross-border partnerships to manage systemic risk (its own Principles 6 and 7).
  2. WMO Unified Data Policy & WIGOS[^wmo]: requires distributed, redundant observing networks for weather and climate data, so no single country's data going offline breaks the global system.
  3. Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction[^sendai]: calls for critical infrastructure to be built with redundancy, so a local disaster doesn't degrade global operational capacity (Priority 4).
  4. Principles for Digital Development[^digital-principles]: "Build for Sustainability" and "Use Open Standards, Open Data, Open Source, and Open Innovation" — to prevent any one country or vendor becoming a lock-in point.
  5. UN General Assembly Resolution 69/266[^unga69266] (2015), "A Global Geodetic Reference Frame for Sustainable Development": calls for countries to cooperate and share the risk and resourcing needed to sustain the global geodetic reference frame.

Guiding Principles for the Target State Architecture ​

Principle 1: Geographic Distribution ​

Elements of the supply chain — observatories, data centres, analysis and combination centres — need to be located where they're actually needed to deliver robust global products, not merely where they happen to sit today: a deliberate, evidence-based geographic configuration sufficient to meet the accuracy, reliability and resilience requirements of geodetic products, including the southern hemisphere and polar regions, where coverage gaps exist today. The maths behind computing a reference frame, and behind producing Essential Geodetic Variables (EGVs), simply doesn't work without it. New and existing facilities also need a durable, long-term investment commitment behind them, so they have a genuine pathway to ongoing operation.

  • Implementation Criteria: Where observatories, data centres, and analysis centres go should be driven by what the International Terrestrial Reference Frame (ITRF) and each EGV product actually need geometrically. Regional hubs need to be built and kept running in under-represented regions, especially the southern hemisphere, to close the coverage gaps (JDP Objective 1.2). Each region's ability to keep observing and delivering data continuously needs to be formally checked against what the products it supports actually require, and backed by funding commitments durable enough that the region stays operational, not just established once.

Principle 2: Political Resilience and Distributed Operational Control ​

No single country should have sole control over any critical function in the global geodesy supply chain. If a Member State withdraws support, faces internal disruption, or simply can't deliver on its commitments, the system needs to keep running. The level of redundancy required should reflect the criticality of the function, the consequences of failure, and the time within which service must be restored — a function with no substitute pathway anywhere needs more protection than one with several capable alternatives already active.

  • Implementation Criteria: Critical functions — observation, archiving, analysis, and combination — need to sit across multiple, independent countries. Where one country currently dominates a critical function (for example, the only combination engine for an EGV product), a formal plan to spread that function out needs to be built and carried through (JDP Objective 1.2). Backup capacity in a different country only counts once it's proven ready to actually run, and sustained through durable funding and workforce commitments so the contingency can genuinely absorb the function if called upon, not just once.

Principle 3: Centralised Accountability through Multilateral Governance ​

One body needs to be clearly and formally accountable for coordinating and driving the supply chain's transition to a robust state — identifying and addressing risks, coordinating improvements, and keeping the capabilities, infrastructure and services behind accurate, reliable and accessible products maintained. That body answers to a multilateral governance council, with every stakeholder group represented. In short: accountability sits in one place, but governance is shared. This is different from Principle 2: Principle 2 is about whether a backup country can actually step in if one fails. This principle is about who is answerable when something goes wrong, no matter which country is running things at the time.

  • Implementation Criteria: A formal governance council holds authority over supply chain standards, service agreements, and reliability thresholds. It brings together Member State governments, the scientific community (with the International Association of Geodesy (IAG) holding a formal seat, to keep science and operations aligned), space agencies, and the private sector.

    This council designates one executive body as accountable for supply chain performance. Which body that is will be a decision for the Consultation Process.

    That executive body checks whether responsibilities are being met, escalates failures, and coordinates fixes when thresholds are breached — including the critical-path decisions described in Principle 5. No Member State or institution can override its reliability decisions unilaterally. The council also needs a means of resolving conflicts between the interests of an individual Member State or organisation and the requirements of the global system — since those two won't always point the same way.

    Over time, responsibilities need to move from best-effort scientific goodwill to formal, long-term agreements — backed by Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Multilateral Memorandums of Understanding (JDP Objective 1.1), providing mechanisms for long-term investment, resource mobilisation and continuity, so critical functions rest on durable multi-year commitments rather than short-term projects.

Principle 4: Technical Interoperability and Data Accessibility ​

Every observatory, data centre, and analysis centre in the supply chain needs to use the same technical standards and open data principles. That way, if data or processing work has to move to a different institution, quality and speed don't suffer. Interoperability needs to be demonstrated operationally, not merely documented.

  • Implementation Criteria: Institutions need to explicitly adopt Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) data principles (JDP Objective 1.2), and register their capabilities in the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Geodetic Register. Shared data formats (like RINEX and SINEX), compatible software, and interoperable APIs are all required, along with the documentation, metadata and quality-controlled processes another qualified provider would actually need to reproduce or continue the service.

    Bodies like the IAG SINEX Working Group need to manage standards proactively, ahead of failures.

    If a primary combination centre goes offline, a designated backup should be able to receive the same data, run the same analysis, and deliver the product on time. That backup capability needs to be proven through periodic, tested failover exercises — with sustained investment in keeping interfaces, documentation and failover capability current treated as a standing requirement, not a one-time exercise.

Principle 5: Minimum Capability Maturity ​

Any observatory or centre on a critical path needs to demonstrate, with independently verifiable evidence, that it meets a minimum standard across all four People, Process, Technology, and Data (PPTD) dimensions. Being on the critical path is a status that the accountable body from Principle 3 grants, reviews, and can withdraw — no institution can simply declare itself critical. The required level should reflect the criticality of the function and the consequences of failure, rather than applying an identical requirement to every participant.

  • Implementation Criteria: Being designated part of the target state architecture requires independently verifiable proof of maturity across all four PPTD dimensions, assessed against the UN-GGCE capability maturity framework[^sog2026]. That means:

    • formal national backing and a long-term funding case (JDP Objective 1.3);
    • real workforce resilience: succession planning and documented knowledge transfer (JDP Objective 1.4); and
    • technology and data practices that meet Principle 4's interoperability standards.

    Maturity needs periodic reassessment, with critical-provider designation reviewed and withdrawn if an institution no longer meets it. Entities that don't yet meet the minimum can still take part in a non-critical role and develop toward it — they just can't be the primary or sole provider of any EGV product until they clear the threshold and it's verified, with sustained funding and workforce commitment showing the capability can be maintained, not just achieved once.

Principle 6: Transparency, Monitoring and Performance Assurance ​

What's critical must be measurable, performance must be visible, risks must be identified early, and failure to meet requirements must trigger action. That means agreed performance and resilience indicators — covering, as appropriate, observatory availability, data timeliness, data quality, product accuracy, product availability, service continuity, redundancy, capability maturity, and resource sustainability — regularly assessed and reported through transparent, recurring mechanisms, with critical providers subject to independent review against their agreed obligations. UN-GGCE acts as a proactive advocate for this infrastructure's resilience: identifying systemic risks — single-provider dependencies, geographic concentration, capability deterioration, standards gaps, emerging threats — and bringing them to Member States and the relevant governance mechanism before being asked, backed by a defined process for escalation, corrective action and, where necessary, replacement or supplementation of the responsible provider.

  • Implementation Criteria: Supply chain maturity needs regular public reporting, building on the State of Geodesy assessment cycle[^sog2026]. UN-GGCE needs to proactively flag systemic risks — like single-provider dependencies or standards gaps — and push for them to be fixed at the intergovernmental level, regardless of which body ends up accountable under Principle 3.

    Data centres and analysis centres need independent audits against their service agreements, with the results made public. Funding — who contributes what, and where it goes — needs to be published transparently, extending to whether the commitments underpinning each critical function remain in place over time, not only at the point they were first assessed.

    Formal reviews need to check performance against agreed targets (observatory uptime, data timeliness, product accuracy), with a clear process for escalating and fixing things — up to and including replacing or supplementing the responsible provider — when targets are missed (JDP Objective 1.1).

Appendix: Broader Research Foundations ​

These principles and the maturity assessment behind them draw on a wide review of economic impact studies, infrastructure risk assessments, and enterprise architecture standards. Key references:

  • Socio-Economic Impact:
    • London Economics (2023): The economic impact on the UK of a disruption to GNSS[^london-econ]
    • EUSPA (European Union Agency for the Space Programme) Market Reports: GNSS and Earth Observation market revenues and dependencies[^euspa]
    • NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) Technical Notes: Evaluation of dependencies of critical infrastructure timing systems on GPS (NIST TN 2187)[^nist2187]
  • Infrastructure Risk & Governance:
    • UK National Risk Register (2023): Assessment of systemic risks to critical national infrastructure[^uk-nrr]
    • US Congressional Reports: Resilient Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) Systems (CRS IF11854)[^crs-pnt]
  • Data & Enterprise Architecture:
    • FAIR Data Principles: Guidelines for ensuring data is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable[^fair]
    • TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework) & DMBOK: Enterprise architecture (The Open Group)[^togaf] and Data Management Body of Knowledge (DAMA)[^dama]
  • UN-GGCE Primary Research & Strategy:
    • International Association of Geodesy (IAG): geodesy.science[^geodesy-science] — the scientific organisation responsible for the field of geodesy, including the Global Geodetic Observing System (GGOS), which defines Essential Geodetic Variables (EGVs) and coordinates the institutions involved.
    • Global Geodesy Needs Assessment (2024)[^needs-assessment]: consultation data from over 500 stakeholders across 110 countries.
    • UN-GGCE Strategy and Operating Plan v1.0[^strategy-plan]: the core operational strategy for UN-GGCE.
    • 1st Joint Development Plan for Global Geodesy[^jdp]: a detailed plan of objective-based actions.
    • Hidden Risk Report[^hidden-risk]: analysis of unseen vulnerabilities in the global geodetic infrastructure.

Next ​

The Investment Prioritisation and Risk Rubric turns these six principles into explicit, measurable floor checks and the bottom-up threshold-setting method referenced above.

[^sog2026]: United Nations Global Geodetic Centre of Excellence, 2026, State of Geodesy 2026: A Baseline Maturity Assessment, Bonn, Germany, https://www.un.org/globalgeospatial/sites/default/files/2026-05/stateofgeodesy.pdf

[^zerodraft]: United Nations Global Geodetic Centre of Excellence, 2026, Zero Draft of a Robust Global Geodesy Supply Chain, 15 April 2026 (internal draft, not yet published)

[^igif]: UN-GGIM, Integrated Geospatial Information Framework (IGIF), https://ggim.un.org/UN-IGIF/

[^wmo]: World Meteorological Organization, 2021, Unified Data Policy (Resolution 1, Cg-Ext 2021), https://library.wmo.int/records/item/58166

[^sendai]: UNDRR, 2015, Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015--2030, https://www.undrr.org/implementing-sendai-framework/what-sendai-framework

[^digital-principles]: Principles for Digital Development, https://digitalprinciples.org/

[^unga69266]: UN General Assembly, 2015, Resolution 69/266: A Global Geodetic Reference Frame for Sustainable Development, https://undocs.org/A/RES/69/266

[^london-econ]: London Economics / UK Government, 2023, The Economic Impact on the UK of a Disruption to GNSS, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-economic-impact-on-the-uk-of-a-disruption-to-gnss

[^euspa]: EUSPA, EO and GNSS Market Report, https://www.euspa.europa.eu/eu-space-programme/eu-space-market-and-users/gnss-and-eo-market-report

[^nist2187]: NIST, 2022, Evaluation of Dependencies of Critical Infrastructure Timing Systems on GPS (Technical Note 2187), https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/TechnicalNotes/NIST.TN.2187.pdf

[^uk-nrr]: UK Government, 2023, National Risk Register, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-risk-register-2023

[^crs-pnt]: Congressional Research Service, Resilient Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) Systems (IF11854), https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11854

[^fair]: GO FAIR, FAIR Principles, https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/

[^togaf]: The Open Group, TOGAF Enterprise Architecture Framework, https://www.opengroup.org/togaf

[^dama]: DAMA International, Data Management Body of Knowledge, https://www.dama.org/cpages/body-of-knowledge

[^geodesy-science]: geodesy.science, https://geodesy.science

[^needs-assessment]: United Nations Global Geodetic Centre of Excellence, 2024, Global Geodesy Needs Assessment, https://ggim.un.org/UNGGCE/documents/20240509-Global_Geodesy_Needs_Assessment.pdf

[^strategy-plan]: United Nations Global Geodetic Centre of Excellence, Strategy and Operating Plan v1.0, https://ggim.un.org/UNGGCE/documents/UN_GGCE_Strategy_ and_Operating_Plan_v1.0.pdf

[^jdp]: United Nations Global Geodetic Centre of Excellence, 2024, 1st Joint Development Plan for Global Geodesy, https://ggim.un.org/UNGGCE/documents/Version_1.0_1st_Joint_Development_Plan_for_Global_Geodesy_EN.pdf

[^hidden-risk]: United Nations Global Geodetic Centre of Excellence, 2024, Hidden Risk Report v1.1, https://ggim.un.org/UNGGCE/documents/20240620-Hidden_Risk_Report.pdf