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Work Assignment 3: Risk Assessment and Gap Analysis
Global Geodesy Supply Chain — Robust Supply Chain Programme
Prepared for: United Nations Global Geodetic Centre of Excellence (UN-GGCE)
Prepared by: Ben Wortley (Lead Consultant, UN-GGCE ToR2)
Date: 7 May 2026
Status: Draft for Review
Reference: WA3, due 29 May 2026
Supporting artefacts: GGSC Event Log 2021–2026 (DataBook); GGSC Ontology Stub v0.1 (DataBook)
Executive Summary
The global geodesy supply chain is the invisible foundation of the modern world. Every satellite navigation signal, every Earth observation product, every precision orbit determination, and every timing synchronisation used across aviation, maritime transport, financial infrastructure, energy grids, and emergency response depends on a continuous chain of ground observations, analysis, and product delivery that most stakeholders — including many of those responsible for the satellites themselves — are entirely unaware of.
This report provides a risk assessment and gap analysis of the five critical geodetic product domains identified in Work Assignment 2: Earth Orientation Parameters (EOP), the International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF), the International Terrestrial Reference Frame (ITRF), Satellite Orbits (GNSS and Earth Observation), and the Global Gravity Model. The assessment draws on verified external sources spanning the period January 2021 to May 2026, supplemented by analysis of the shared SSCG event log.
The findings are sobering. The supply chain is simultaneously underfunded, geopolitically fragmented, structurally brittle, and — for the first time in its history — under active, acknowledged attack. Annual global funding for the entire GGSC is estimated at €60–90 million: less than 0.05% of the revenue generated by the services it supports. A single large-scale geomagnetic storm, a handful of key station closures, or a sustained escalation of GNSS jamming could degrade products that underpin billions of euros of daily economic activity — and the world would have no coordinated institutional mechanism capable of responding.
The most acute near-term risk is GNSS signal integrity: deliberate jamming and spoofing now affect five major global maritime and aviation regions, with Russia having formally acknowledged ongoing operations in the Baltic Sea and the Persian Gulf crisis of June 2025 having disrupted over 3,000 vessels in under a fortnight. The most consequential medium-term structural risk is the potential degradation of the NASA Space Geodesy Programme under ongoing US federal budget pressure, which would reduce the single largest national contribution to the GGSC with no replacement mechanism in place.
Eight priority gaps are identified. Three are classified Critical; four are High priority. Recommendations are provided for each.
1. Introduction
1.1 Scope and Purpose
This report constitutes Work Assignment 3 of the Robust Global Geodesy Supply Chain Programme. Its purpose is to assess the risks and identify the gaps in the supply chain that produces the five critical geodetic products mapped in WA2. Where WA2 described the workflow dependencies of each product, WA3 asks what can go wrong, what has gone wrong in the recent historical record, and where the supply chain is structurally incomplete.
The assessment covers the period January 2021 to May 2026. This window was chosen because it captures three transformative events: the Russian invasion of Ukraine (February 2022), which restructured the geopolitical risk landscape for geodesy permanently; the establishment of the UN-GGCE (March 2023), which for the first time gave the global geodetic community an institutional home within the United Nations; and the onset of DOGE-driven federal budget restructuring in the United States (early 2025), which introduced significant uncertainty into the largest single national contributor to the supply chain.
1.2 Methodology
Risk assessment draws on three sources: verified external documentation (peer-reviewed publications, UN-GGCE reports, EASA safety bulletins, national geodetic agency publications, and investigative journalism with traceable sourcing); the SSCG event log maintained in the shared Jena triple store; and the structural analysis produced by the Holonic Graph Architecture (HGA) pipeline applied to the product dependency maps from WA2. All external sources are cited with verifiable URLs. Where the HGA pipeline surfaced events not present in the external literature, these are flagged as inferred from the event log rather than externally sourced.
1.3 Risk Classification
Events and gaps are classified using four concern levels: Critical (immediate systemic threat requiring urgent action), High (significant risk with near-term consequences if unaddressed), Medium (notable risk with manageable near-term impact), and Low (monitor). A fifth category — Positive development — flags improvements to supply chain resilience. The concern levels map directly to the observation state model in the GGSC ontology and to HGA severity levels, enabling the risk assessment to be ingested into the SCE pipeline.
2. Structural Context: The Invisible Infrastructure Problem
Before addressing specific product risks, it is necessary to understand the structural conditions that amplify every individual risk in the supply chain.
2.1 Systemic Underfunding
The UN-GGCE's Hidden Risk report (June 2024) — the first comprehensive supply chain risk document produced for decision-makers rather than the geodetic scientific community — established a finding that should be the starting point of every conversation about GGSC risk: the entire global geodesy supply chain operates on annual funding of approximately €60–90 million. This is less than 0.05% of the annual revenue generated by GNSS and Earth observation services that the supply chain enables. Put differently, for every €2,000 generated by the satellite services economy, the infrastructure keeping those services accurate and reliable receives less than €1.
This is not merely an abstract concern about proportionality. It means that the supply chain has no financial resilience. There are no redundant analysis centres standing by to absorb a sudden gap in coverage. There are no reserve stations to deploy when a key observatory fails. There is no funded succession mechanism when a critical satellite mission ends. The 11-month gap between the end of the original GRACE mission in October 2017 and the launch of GRACE-FO in May 2018 — which forced interpolation across the global gravity field time series — illustrates precisely what structural underfunding looks like in practice. No one decided to create that gap; it arose because no funding existed to prevent it.
2.2 Absence of a Governance Body
The global geodesy supply chain has no international governance body with the authority, mandate, or resources to act as a system-level custodian. Meteorology has the World Meteorological Organisation. Aviation has ICAO. Maritime navigation has IMO. Geodesy has the UN-GGCE — established in March 2023 and still operating on the basis of in-kind contributions and voluntary secondments.
The practical consequences of this gap are visible throughout the event log. When the Russian invasion of Ukraine disrupted contributions from the Institute of Applied Astronomy (IAA) in St Petersburg — a key VLBI analysis centre supporting both EOP and ICRF maintenance — there was no institutional body with the standing to negotiate continued data access, establish a continuity protocol, or fund a replacement capacity. The community adapted, as it always has, on a best-effort basis. But best-effort adaptation is not supply chain management; it is crisis improvisation, and it does not scale.
2.3 Data Collection on a Best-Effort Basis
The UN-GGCE has documented that data collection from ground station observatories, along with the quality checking, analysis, and product development that follows, is conducted on a best-effort, in-kind contribution model. There is no service-level agreement binding any contributing nation to maintain its stations, no contractual obligation to provide data to international centres, and no penalty for withdrawal. This model has sustained the supply chain admirably through decades of geopolitical stability. It is not designed for the environment that now exists.
3. Risk Assessment by Critical Product Domain
3.1 Earth Orientation Parameters (EOP)
Overall risk: HIGH — with one CRITICAL sub-product
Earth Orientation Parameters describe the relationship between the International Celestial Reference Frame and the International Terrestrial Reference Frame: how the Earth rotates, wobbles, and varies in its relationship to the stars. They are the connective tissue between the two primary reference frames. Without continuously updated EOP, satellite orbits degrade, timing systems drift, and the precision of every downstream product erodes.
The five EOP products carry markedly different risk profiles. Precession and nutation are highly predictable and model-driven; they represent low supply chain concern. Polar motion and Length of Day are dynamic but measurable by multiple technique combinations; they carry medium concern. UT1-UTC is the critical product. It is dynamically variable, unpredictable, and uniquely dependent on continuous VLBI observations — no other space geodetic technique can independently determine UT1-UTC with the required precision. A sustained interruption to the global VLBI network, whether from station failure, funding loss, or geopolitical disruption, would degrade UT1-UTC within weeks and begin affecting satellite operations within months.
Two specific events in the review period raise the UT1-UTC risk level from High to Critical when considered together. First, the disruption to the Institute of Applied Astronomy in St Petersburg following Russia's invasion of Ukraine: IAA operates both a VLBI analysis centre and a correlator within the IVS network, and its contributions to EOP processing became uncertain from February 2022. Second, the ongoing deployment of the VLBI Global Observing System (VGOS) — the next-generation geodetic VLBI network designed to improve UT1-UTC latency and accuracy — remains incomplete, with significant geographic gaps in Africa and parts of Asia that limit uniform global baseline coverage. An incomplete VGOS is more resilient than the legacy S/X network it is replacing, but it is not the fully redundant system that UT1-UTC maintenance ultimately requires.
Solar Cycle 25, which exceeded its original forecast and peaked at higher activity levels than the 2020 NOAA/NASA panel predicted, introduced elevated ionospheric disturbance across 2024–2025. This degrades VLBI delay measurements, GNSS positioning, and DORIS tracking — all inputs to EOP processing. EASA, Trimble, and IATA all issued advisories on GNSS signal degradation during this period; the same ionospheric conditions affect geodetic observation quality at the ground station level.
Gap: The VGOS network is geographically incomplete. Southern Hemisphere and African coverage remain inadequate for the uniform global coverage UT1-UTC determination requires.
3.2 International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF)
Overall risk: MEDIUM — with specific station-loss vulnerability
The ICRF defines the orientation of the Earth in inertial space using the positions of extragalactic radio sources (quasars), determined by VLBI. It is the most stable reference available to humanity. Its direct supply chain risk in the short term is lower than EOP because the ICRF is updated infrequently — the current realisation (ICRF3) is stable and does not require continuous operational updating in the same way as EOP. However, the ICRF's long-term integrity depends on the same VLBI network that supports UT1-UTC, and it faces two specific risks in the review period.
The first is the IAA St Petersburg situation. The IAA VLBI Analysis Centre contributed to IVS ICRF maintenance sessions and participated in VLBI correlator operations. Its post-2022 status in the international IVS framework is uncertain. Russia's increasing isolation from international geodetic bodies — documented by both GPS World and the IAG's own communications — means this contribution cannot be assumed to continue.
The second is radio frequency interference. Geodetic VLBI operates at specific radio frequencies that are increasingly threatened by commercial and military spectrum use. The IVS filed for a new agenda item at WRC-2031 (the World Radio Conference, next scheduled for 2031) to formally protect VLBI frequencies. The six-year horizon of that protection process, against a backdrop of rapidly expanding commercial spectrum use and deliberate electronic warfare operations, represents a meaningful medium-term risk to VLBI observation quality and therefore to ICRF maintenance capacity.
Gap: No mechanism exists to ensure continued access to data from stations in geopolitically sensitive territories when bilateral relations deteriorate.
3.3 International Terrestrial Reference Frame (ITRF)
Overall risk: HIGH
The ITRF is the coordinate system in which everything on and near the Earth is located. It underpins WGS 84 (the GPS coordinate reference), Galileo's coordinate frame, BeiDou's coordinate framework, and every national geodetic survey. ITRF2020, released in April 2022 and representing the eighth ITRF realisation since 1994, is the current standard. WGS 84 was aligned to ITRF2020 by the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in January 2024, with the US Space Force GPS control segment updated on 4 March 2024.
The long-term stability goal for the ITRF is 0.1 mm per year — the precision required to measure sea level rise, tectonic motion, and ice sheet dynamics at scientifically meaningful scales. This goal has not yet been achieved; current accuracy is at the 1–2 mm level. The ESA GENESIS mission, confirmed for development and targeting launch in the coming years, is specifically designed to close this gap by placing a satellite carrying all four geodetic techniques (VLBI, SLR, GNSS, DORIS) in a single orbit, enabling direct inter-technique bias determination that is not currently possible from ground co-location alone. GENESIS is the most significant positive development for ITRF accuracy in the review period.
Against this positive, the most significant ITRF risk in the review period is the budget pressure on NASA's Space Geodesy Programme. NASA operates the NASA Space Geodesy Network (NSGN) — the largest single national contribution of collocated geodetic stations to the global infrastructure — as well as the NASA Global GNSS Network (GGN) and the Crustal Dynamics Data Information System (CDDIS), the primary international archive for IVS and ILRS data. The DOGE-initiated NASA review of February 2025, the subsequent workforce reductions, and the ongoing budget uncertainty all threaten the continuity of these operations. A draft Environmental Impact Statement for real-estate agreements at the Kokee Park Geophysical Observatory (KPGO) in Hawaii — an important collocated VLBI/SLR/GNSS station — was issued in June 2025, indicating that the operational tenure of that site is under active review.
The ILRS simulation study presented at EGU 2025 quantified what this means structurally: loss of relatively few SLR stations can cause significant degradation of the combined global terrestrial reference frame. The GGSC has no formal mechanism to compensate for the loss of a major contributing nation's network, and no alternative provider capable of replacing NASA's station portfolio at scale.
The geopolitical dimension adds a further layer. Both Russia and China operate key VLBI and SLR stations that contribute to ITRF. Russian stations face access uncertainty post-2022; Chinese stations remain accessible but are subject to the same geopolitical risk dynamics that have constrained broader scientific cooperation. The ITRF is formally an international product, but its underlying observations are concentrated in a small number of national networks whose continued participation cannot be guaranteed by institutional means.
Gap: No redundancy or continuity plan exists for the NASA Space Geodesy Network. If US contributions are reduced or suspended, there is no replacement mechanism.
3.4 Satellite Orbits (GNSS and Earth Observation)
Overall risk: CRITICAL
Satellite orbit determination — the continuous calculation of where every operational satellite is, to the centimetre level, at every moment — is the most operationally time-sensitive product in the GGSC. Degradation of orbit products propagates to GPS navigation error within hours. It is also, as of the review period, under active and sustained attack.
The scale of GNSS jamming and spoofing since February 2022 represents a qualitative change in the threat environment, not merely a quantitative increase. Prior to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, GNSS interference events were documented but episodic. Since February 2022, EASA's own data shows a 220% increase in GPS signal loss events affecting aircraft between 2021 and 2024. The GPSPATRON maritime analysis documents the expansion from two regional hotspots (Baltic Sea, Black Sea) to five major interference zones: Baltic, Black Sea, Eastern Mediterranean, Red Sea/Gulf of Aden, and the Persian Gulf. In April 2024, 117 ships were simultaneously spoofed to appear at Beirut Airport. In March 2024, a single jamming event centred on Russia's Kaliningrad exclave affected more than 1,600 aircraft over two days. In June 2025, over 3,000 vessels were disrupted in the Persian Gulf within a fortnight. In that same month, Russia formally acknowledged conducting deliberate jamming operations affecting civil receivers in the Baltic Sea, and indicated it would continue to do so.
The December 2024 crash of Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 in Kazakhstan — in which GPS spoofing has been cited as a possible contributing factor, pending the formal accident investigation findings — marks the point at which GNSS interference transitioned from an operational nuisance to a potential safety hazard with fatal consequences. ICAO has adopted resolutions condemning interference; Estonia, Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania have filed complaints with the ITU's Radio Regulations Board. These are important and appropriate institutional responses. They have not stopped the jamming.
Running in parallel with the immediate interference threat is the longer-term structural question of the GLONASS constellation. Western sanctions imposed after February 2022 cut Russia's access to the radiation-hardened electronics that constitute up to 90% of GLONASS-K satellite components. Multiple GLONASS-K satellites launched in 2022–2023 remained in flight test phase years after launch; existing operational satellites are operating beyond their warranted design lifetimes; the manufacturing pipeline for replacement satellites is compromised. Russia's response — to integrate Chinese-made components and formalise interoperability between BeiDou and GLONASS — creates a geopolitical dependency cluster with significant implications for the GGSC's principle of multi-source redundancy. If GLONASS degrades further, China's BeiDou becomes the effective backup GNSS for a substantial portion of the globe — including nations that may not have intended that outcome.
BeiDou itself is a positive development in terms of technical capability: ICAO recognised BeiDou for global civil aviation in November 2023; the US government's own GPS advisory board acknowledged in 2022 that GPS capabilities are "now substantially inferior to those of China's BeiDou." The geopolitical implications of that technical superiority, and of the expanding network of BeiDou ground stations in Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Saudi Arabia, and across Africa, are beyond the scope of this report to resolve — but they are not beyond the scope of the GGSC to acknowledge.
Gap: No multi-lateral mechanism exists to deter, attribute, or respond to deliberate GNSS jamming as an attack on global civil infrastructure. ICAO resolutions are necessary but not sufficient.
Gap: GLONASS constellation degradation is accelerating with no viable timeline for remediation under current sanction conditions. The effective two-constellation GNSS environment (GPS + BeiDou) introduces systemic geopolitical concentration risk.
3.5 Global Gravity Model
Overall risk: HIGH — with a deferred-onset continuity risk
The Global Gravity Model defines the shape of the geoid — the equipotential surface that defines "sea level" globally — and tracks its temporal variation due to ice melt, groundwater depletion, ocean mass redistribution, and solid Earth deformation. It is essential for sea level science, ice sheet monitoring, hydrological analysis, satellite orbit determination, and height reference systems. The primary source of time-variable gravity data is the GRACE-FO mission, a joint USA/Germany satellite pair launched in May 2018 as successor to the original GRACE (2002–2017).
GRACE-FO is operating well. Multiple processing centres — CSR, GFZ, JPL, AIUB, ITSG — produce monthly gravity solutions, and the COST-G combination product provides the recommended international standard. This is a healthy, well-organised processing environment.
The risk is not present; it is structural and deferred. GRACE-FO has no confirmed funded successor mission. The lesson of 2017–2018 — when GRACE ended in October 2017 and GRACE-FO was not launched until May 2018, creating an 11-month gap that required interpolation and degraded the continuity of global mass change records — has not yet produced a funded continuity programme. The original GRACE mission operated for 15 years before its planned 5-year design lifetime expired; GRACE-FO, launched in 2018, is now seven years into what was also planned as a five-year mission. It cannot be assumed to operate indefinitely.
Budget pressure on NASA, amplified by the DOGE reviews of 2025, increases the risk that a GRACE-FO successor programme will not receive timely funding. A gravity monitoring gap of 12–24 months — plausible given current institutional dynamics — would degrade the continuity of ice sheet mass balance records, introduce systematic error into the geoid, and compromise long-period climate attribution studies that depend on unbroken mass change time series going back to 2002.
Gap: GRACE-FO has no confirmed funded successor. The 2017–2018 gap precedent demonstrates that mission continuity cannot be assumed from programmatic inertia alone.
4. Cross-Cutting Risks
4.1 Geopolitical Fragmentation
The most significant structural change to the GGSC risk environment in the review period is the deepening fragmentation of the geopolitical landscape in which the supply chain operates. The GGSC was designed in an era of broadly cooperative international science. Its governance model — voluntary in-kind contributions, best-effort data sharing, consensus-based product development — reflects that era's assumptions.
Those assumptions no longer hold. Russia's isolation from international geodetic bodies has removed a historically significant contributor from the cooperative framework. The BeiDou–GLONASS interoperability agreement formalises a Sino-Russian geodetic alignment that has no precedent in the post-Cold War period. China's expansion of geodetic infrastructure in regions of strategic interest creates a parallel ground network whose governance relationship to the existing international framework is undefined. US domestic political dynamics now threaten the continuity of NASA's geodetic contributions in ways that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.
None of these developments individually constitutes a crisis. Together, they constitute a structural shift in the geopolitical substrate of a supply chain that has no institutional mechanism to manage geopolitical risk.
4.2 United States Federal Budget Instability
The United States is the single largest national contributor to the GGSC, operating the NSGN, GGN, CDDIS, GPS constellation, and contributing major analytical capacity through NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The DOGE review of NASA, which commenced in February 2025, the workforce reductions that followed, and the ongoing uncertainty around NASA's science budget represent the largest near-term institutional risk to the supply chain that is not driven by geopolitical hostility. Unlike Russian interference, which is deliberate and external, US budget instability is a product of domestic policy dynamics that the geodetic community has no mechanism to influence.
The critical concern is not that NASA will withdraw from the GGSC; it is that the degradation will be gradual, unannounced, and invisible until a product quality threshold is crossed. Station maintenance deferred, workforce expertise lost through attrition, data centre operations running on reduced capacity — these are the modes of failure that a best-effort, in-kind contribution model is structurally incapable of detecting before they become irreversible.
4.3 Solar Cycle 25 and Space Weather
Solar Cycle 25 has been more active than originally forecast. Peak activity in 2024–2025 elevated ionospheric disturbance across GNSS frequencies, VLBI observing bands, and DORIS tracking systems. The practical effect is a degradation of observation quality across every space geodetic technique simultaneously — precisely the correlated failure mode that the multi-technique combination strategy of the GGSC is designed to mitigate, but cannot fully compensate for when all techniques are affected at once. The cycle is now past its peak, and conditions are expected to improve through 2026–2027.
4.4 Workforce Decline
The UN-GGCE has documented a decline in the number of geodetic professionals in many parts of the world, associated with reduced training pathways, low public visibility of the field, and the retirement of cohorts trained during the growth period of space geodesy in the 1990s and 2000s. This is a slow-onset risk whose effects accumulate over years. It does not appear dramatically in an event log. But it is perhaps the deepest structural vulnerability in the supply chain, because expertise, once lost from an institution, cannot be rapidly reconstituted.
5. Gap Analysis
The following gaps are identified as priorities for the WA4 architecture work and the WA5 implementation roadmap.
5.1 Alignment with WA1 Guiding Principles
Each gap violates one or more of the six guiding principles established in WA1 v2 (Blueprint for a Robust Global Geodetic Supply Chain). The table below makes this alignment explicit, connecting the risk findings of WA3 to the normative framework agreed in WA1.
| Gap | Classification | WA1 Principle(s) Violated | Principle Statement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gap 1: No international governance body | Critical | P3 | Centralized Accountability through Multilateral Governance |
| Gap 2: Funding below 0.05% of dependent revenue | Critical | P3, P5 | Multilateral Governance; Minimum Capability Maturity Standards |
| Gap 3: No multilateral GNSS jamming deterrence | Critical | P2 | Political Resilience and Distributed Operational Control |
| Gap 4: No continuity plan for NASA Space Geodesy | High | P2 | Political Resilience and Distributed Operational Control |
| Gap 5: VGOS network geographically incomplete | High | P1 | Geographic Distribution for Technical Performance |
| Gap 6: GRACE-FO has no confirmed funded successor | High | P5 | Minimum Capability Maturity Standards |
| Gap 7: No data access mechanism for sensitive territories | High | P4 | Technical Interoperability and Data Accessibility |
| Gap 8: WRC-2031 frequency protection not secured | Medium | P4 | Technical Interoperability and Data Accessibility |
Observation: Gaps 1–4 — the three Critical and the highest-priority High gap — all trace to failures of Principles 2 and 3: political resilience and multilateral governance. This is not coincidental. The supply chain's technical performance (Principles 1, 4, 5) is constrained but manageable; its governance and political architecture (Principles 2, 3) is structurally absent. No amount of technical investment will resolve the supply chain's systemic fragility without addressing the governance vacuum first.
5.2 Capability Maturity Baseline Evidence
The State of Geodesy 2026: A Baseline Maturity Assessment (UN-GGCE, 16 March 2026) established a post-consultation capability maturity baseline for the GGSC across the PPTD (People, Process, Technology, Data) dimensions. The scores below are drawn from that final published assessment and provide quantitative grounding for each gap identified in this report. Scores are on a 1–5 scale; unscored capabilities (—) indicate no systematic data collection at present.
| Gap | Relevant Capability | Score | Dimension | Threshold |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gap 1: No governance body | Mandate | 1.0 | Process | Critical (≤ 2.0) |
| Gap 1: No governance body | Policy Formulation | 1.0 | Process | Critical (≤ 2.0) |
| Gap 1: No governance body | Strategic Planning | 1.0 | Process | Critical (≤ 2.0) |
| Gap 2: Systemic underfunding | Funding and Investment | 1.0 | Process | Critical (≤ 2.0) |
| Gap 2: Systemic underfunding | Budgeting | 1.0 | Process | Critical (≤ 2.0) |
| Gap 3: GNSS jamming deterrence | Risk Management | 1.0 | Process | Critical (≤ 2.0) |
| Gap 3: GNSS jamming deterrence | Cyber Security | 3.0 | Technology | Adequate |
| Gap 4: NASA continuity | Disaster Recovery and Supply Chain Continuity | 1.7 | Process | Critical (≤ 2.0) |
| Gap 4: NASA continuity | Performance Management | 2.0 | Process | Critical (≤ 2.0) |
| Gap 5: VGOS incomplete | VLBI Data Acquisition | 2.8 | Technology | Adequate |
| Gap 5: VGOS incomplete | Ground-Based Asset Management | 1.8 | Technology | High (≤ 2.0) |
| Gap 6: GRACE-FO successor | Gravity Data Acquisition | 2.0 | Data | Critical (≤ 2.0) |
| Gap 6: GRACE-FO successor | Funding and Investment | 1.0 | Process | Critical (≤ 2.0) |
| Gap 7: Data access — sensitive territories | Data Sharing | 3.3 | Data | Adequate |
| Gap 7: Data access — sensitive territories | Data Distribution | — | Data | Unscored |
| Gap 8: WRC-2031 frequency protection | Standards Development and Promotion | 3.0 | Process | Adequate |
| Gap 8: WRC-2031 frequency protection | Partnership and Collaboration | 2.0 | Process | Adequate |
Interpretation: The governance and financing capabilities (Mandate, Policy Formulation, Strategic Planning, Funding and Investment, Budgeting) are all scored at 1.0 — the minimum observed value in the published assessment and well within the Critical threshold (≤ 2.0). The final post-consultation assessment has now scored Risk Management (1.0) and Disaster Recovery and Supply Chain Continuity (1.7), confirming both as Critical and eliminating the prior data gap. Performance Management (revised from 3.0 to 2.0) has dropped to the Critical threshold, indicating that operational monitoring is less mature than pre-consultation estimates suggested. Only Data Distribution remains unscored, representing the one remaining measurement gap relevant to this assessment's gaps. The concentration of Critical-rated capabilities in governance, financing, and resilience domains directly substantiates the priority ordering of this risk assessment.
Critical Gaps
Gap 1: No international governance body for the GGSC
The absence of a body equivalent to the WMO — with a mandate, member state obligations, and operational resources — means the supply chain cannot be managed as a system. The UN-GGCE is a necessary and welcome development, but it is not yet that body. Recommendation: The 1st Joint Development Plan's governance track should explicitly address the pathway from UN-GGCE to a body with operational authority and member state funding obligations.
Gap 2: GGSC funding below 0.05% of dependent revenue
The structural funding gap cannot be addressed by individual member states acting independently. It requires a coordinated financing model — potentially blended public-private, with GNSS service providers and downstream industries making proportionate contributions to the infrastructure that enables their revenue. Recommendation: Commission a formal economic analysis of the cost of supply chain failure (analogous to the 2023 London Economics study for the UK GNSS disruption scenario) and present it to member states as the basis for a funding compact.
Gap 3: GNSS jamming and spoofing: no multi-lateral deterrence mechanism
ICAO resolutions and ITU complaints are appropriate responses to GNSS interference as a civil aviation safety issue. They are not sufficient responses to GNSS interference as a deliberate attack on global civil infrastructure. Recommendation: Advocate for the designation of GNSS integrity as critical global infrastructure under applicable international law, establishing a legal basis for attributable interference to be treated as an attack on shared civil systems.
High-Priority Gaps
Gap 4: No continuity plan for NASA Space Geodesy Programme
Recommendation: Develop a formal continuity protocol for NSGN stations — identifying minimum operational requirements, alternative host organisations for key stations, and data centre redundancy — that does not depend on a single national programme's budget stability.
Gap 5: VGOS network geographically incomplete
Africa and parts of Asia have insufficient VLBI coverage for VGOS to deliver the UT1-UTC latency and accuracy improvements it was designed to provide. Recommendation: Prioritise capacity-building investment in underserved regions as part of the JDP implementation; identify candidate sites in East Africa and South-East Asia for VGOS-compatible stations.
Gap 6: GRACE-FO has no confirmed funded successor
Recommendation: Establish a multi-nation funding commitment for a GRACE-C or equivalent mission before GRACE-FO's operational lifetime is exhausted. The precedent of the 2017–2018 gap demonstrates that programmatic inertia is not an adequate continuity strategy.
Gap 7: No mechanism for data access in geopolitically sensitive territories
Recommendation: Develop bilateral data-sharing agreements modelled on scientific exchange protocols that are insulated from general diplomatic relations — analogous to the protections afforded to Antarctic scientific cooperation.
Gap 8: WRC-2031 frequency protection for geodetic VLBI not secured
Recommendation: Support the IVS WRC-2031 agenda item actively and ensure member state delegations to ITU carry a coordinated position on geodetic VLBI frequency protection.
6. Country Risk Summary
| Country | Role | Near-Term Risk | Severity |
|---|---|---|---|
| USA | GPS, NSGN, CDDIS, IGS analysis | DOGE-driven budget instability threatening largest single national GGSC contribution | High |
| RUS | GLONASS operator, IAA VLBI, active jamming actor | GLONASS degradation; deliberate GNSS interference endemic across five regions | Critical |
| CHN | BeiDou operator, VLBI/SLR stations, GRACE-FO processing | Growing strategic influence; BeiDou–GLONASS alignment; geopolitical access risk | Medium |
| EU / DEU | Galileo, ESA, UN-GGCE host (BKG), GFZ | Low institutional risk; GENESIS mission positive; BKG/GFZ well-funded | Low |
| FRA | IERS Central Bureau (Paris Observatory), CNES, DORIS | Critical chokepoint for EOP product delivery; funding continuity essential | Medium |
| AUS | Geoscience Australia, AuScope VLBI, Southern Hemisphere coverage | Stable contributor; low near-term risk | Low |
| INT | All multi-national bodies (IERS, IVS, ILRS, IGS, IDS) | Governance vacuum; best-effort model insufficient for current risk environment | High |
Note: This table presents selected high-impact actors. Full risk projections for all 20 country agents modelled in the GGSC dataset — including Japan, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Canada, Brazil, Uganda, South Africa, Austria, United Kingdom, Iran, and China — are provided in the accompanying country risk DataBooks.
7. Recommendations Summary
- Designate the GGSC as critical global infrastructure at the UN level, creating a legal and political basis for member state obligations and institutional protection.
- Establish a GGSC funding compact proportionate to dependent revenue, including private sector contributions from GNSS service providers and major downstream industries.
- Develop a multi-lateral deterrence framework for GNSS jamming and spoofing as attacks on shared civil infrastructure.
- Create a NASA Space Geodesy Network continuity protocol independent of any single national budget.
- Prioritise VGOS expansion into Africa and South-East Asia as the highest-leverage technical investment for UT1-UTC resilience.
- Commit to GRACE-C funding before GRACE-FO's operational lifetime is exhausted.
- Pursue bilateral data-sharing agreements for geodetic data from stations in geopolitically sensitive territories, insulated from general diplomatic relations.
- Coordinate member state positions at WRC-2031 to secure formal frequency protection for geodetic VLBI.
8. Relationship to WA4 and WA5
The gaps and recommendations identified in this report define the scope of WA4's architecture work. The SCE/HGA supply chain architecture to be developed in WA4 must be designed to:
- Support the
ggsc:countryproperty and country risk classification across all modelled resources, enabling geopolitical risk to be queried and surfaced as a first-class SCE observation. - Integrate verifiable credentials (via the HGA VC/ACL layer) as the mechanism for asserting and verifying station operability, product integrity, and organisational credentials — replacing the current best-effort, trust-by-convention model with a cryptographically verifiable attestation layer.
- Model the dependency graph between products, techniques, stations, and analysis centres in sufficient detail to support simulation studies analogous to the ILRS station-loss analysis presented at EGU 2025.
WA5's implementation roadmap will need to phase the recommendations above against realistic timelines for governance change, funding negotiation, and technical deployment. The VC/ACL layer and the ggsc:country risk model are the architectural elements most directly enabling the policy recommendations; they should be prioritised in the WA4 delivery.
Appendix: Primary Sources
Prepared by Ben Wortley — UN-GGCE ToR2 Consulting Engagement
ben@merchantsofmalta.com
© 2026 Ben Wortley