John Ball was elected to the Executive Board of the International Council for Science (ICSU) at its 30th General Assembly held in Rome 24 September - October 1, 2011.
As described on the IMU website,
"ICSU is the International Council of Science. Its members are scientific international unions and nations. Together with other partners including the United Nations and UNESCO, it plays a fundamental role in the research areas which require both massive collaboration and sharing of data, such as the global climate studies that supported the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and which received the Nobel Prize in 2007. Such studies cannot take place without long term massive support allowing large scale collaboration of scientists across disciplines and countries, and archiving of data of previous studies, a support that cannot be provided locally at research institutions. The International Council of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) is now an associate member of ICSU."