SWOTH Analysis for Geological Survey

• Expertise / knowledge
• Excellence / high standing
• Impartiality
• National and international networks
• Massive data sets collected to uniform standards
• Long-term stability
• Multidisciplinary

• Aging organization, with a skewed age profile
• Expertise not always up to date
• Inadequate funding
• Overwhelmed by data
• Conservative, with built-in inertia
• Not good at explaining geoscience and its relevance
• Conflict between "commercial" aims and public science responsibility

• Ever-greater need for Earth's resources
• Increasing environmental pressures
• Increasing use of underground utilities / urban services / transportaion
• Increasing cost and human impact of geohazards
• Resource and land-use conflicts require "honest broker"
• Networks in place for greater "internationallty"
• New ways to exploit existing data
• New "business" providing new income
• Awareness of sustainable development

• Some government agendas:
  • decreased public spending in science
  • market testing
  • commercialization of data sets
  • more competition
  • more geological "cells" in government departments / agencies
• Unwillingness to change
• Not-stable funding of long-term strategic geosciences
• Private sector in "traditional" survey area
• Belief (by government) that geological survey activity can be completed