Renowned international organizations, emergency medical services and resuscitation leaders achieved consensus on the establishment of a Global Resuscitation Alliance May 28-29th 2016 in Copenhagen at an international Utstein Meeting. The meeting was held in connection to the first European EMS congress EMS2016 and supported by Laerdal Foundation and the Danish foundation TrygFonden. GRA is the result of a targeted effort towards enhanced survival rates that took its beginning in 1990, when experts convened at the first Utstein meeting in Norway to adopt a set of global guidelines for uniform reporting of sudden cardiac arrests. This came to mark the beginning of intensified collaboration efforts. Since then, a set of shared international guidelines concerning the treatment of sudden cardiac arrest has been adopted, and this has led to a significant improvement in the number of survivors.