NFDI4Earth addresses digital needs of Earth System (ES) Sciences (ESS). ES scientists cooperate in international and interdisciplinary networks with the overarching aim to understand the functioning and interactions within the Earth system and address the multiple challenges of global change. NFDI4Earth is a community-driven process providing researchers with FAIR, coherent, and open access to all relevant ES data, to innovative research data management (RDM) and data science methods. The NFDI4Earth work plan comprises four task areas (TA), of which TA1 and TA2 are first introduced here: TA1 2Participate will engage with the ESS community and secures that NFDI4Earth is driven by user requirements: Pilots, small agile projects proposed by the community leverage existing technologies and manifest the researchers’ RDM needs. The Incubator Lab identifies promising new tools and scouts for trends in ES Data Science. EduHubs produce open, ready to use educational resources on implementing FAIR principles in the ESS. The Academy will connect young researchers and their data-driven research to NFDI4Earth. TA2 2Facilitate realizes the OneStop4All as the web-based entry point to FAIR, open and innovative RDM in ESS. It supports on how to find, access, share, publish and work with ES data. Specific user requests beyond the scope of the OneStop4All will be routed to a distributed User Support Network. TA2 will also unlock the wealth of data that exists in governmental data repositories and will collaborate with all services on supporting long-term archiving. TA3 2Interoperate and TA4 2Coordinate will follow as a second abstract.