BAMOS
Special Issue
9
Resolution 40
The 1995 Congress negotiations that led to the unanimous adoption of Resolution 40 under the presidency of the visionary Zou Jingmeng of China ( Figure 7 ) make a fascinating story ( WMO , 2019b ; Zillman , 2019 ) which there is not space to tell here . Suffice it to say that , notwithstanding the various qualifications and caveats built into the text of the Resolution and its four annexes , the Congress committed WMO to continued free and unrestricted international exchange of data and products as ‘ a fundamental principle of WMO ’.
The adoption of Resolution 40 was not a foregone conclusion :
• Until the President of WMO brought down the gavel on the afternoon of 21 June 1995 , it was touch and go and the fragile consensus could have collapsed at any moment .
• Its adoption was more a product of deep-seated belief in the goodness of international cooperation in meteorology than of any particular line of legal or economic argument .
• Few of those who rose in standing ovation at its adoption knew how we were going to make it work .
The follow-up and implementation of Resolution 40 over the next eight years was extremely challenging but , as far as I am aware , no-one in the WMO community ever had second thoughts about its adoption . We extended it to hydrology through Resolution 25 of the 1999 Congress and to oceanography in 2003 through the close WMO partnership with the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission ( IOC ).
We built the basic principle of free exchange into the work of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change ( UNFCCC ) and the Global Climate Observing System ( GCOS ) ( Houghton et al , 2012 ). And I think it is fair to say that it significantly influenced the Group on Earth Observations ( GEO ) adoption of free exchange as the data policy for the Global Earth Observation System of Systems ( GEOSS ) ( Zillman , 2005 ).
There were discussions in the wake of Resolution 40 , including with some who were present at the birth of the WMO Convention ( Gibbs , 1994 ), as to why the founding fathers of WMO did not include ‘ free and unrestricted exchange ’ explicitly in the 1947 text of the Convention . The dominant conclusion was that , in those days , in the euphoria of the end of World War II and creation of the United Nations , it seemed so self-evidently the right thing for the whole world that it would have been almost inappropriate to imply that there could be any other possibility than free exchange .
We also discussed whether , with the crisis passed , we could improve Resolution 40 . But it soon became clear that the Resolution 40 generation were so traumatised by the experience of having nearly lost free exchange completely that we were not willing to see the issues and the conflict reopened , at least not on our watch , in the hope of building a better and more robust framework . And we were not even brave enough to risk their reopening through an attempt to incorporate ‘ free and unrestricted exchange ’ explicitly into the text of the Convention .
Figure 7 : The
President of WMO ( 1987 – 1995 ), Mr Zou Jingmeng of China ( centre ), presiding over the Twelfth World Meteorological
Congress which adopted Resolution
40 , and his successor as President ( 1995 – 2003 ), John Zillman of Australia ( second from left ), who presided over the first eight years of its implementation . The WMO Secretary-
General , Professor G . O . P . Obasi , is fourth from the left . © WMO .