Addressing these unique set of global challenges and progressing towards a sustainable climate transition, requires more than ever that scientists advance their understanding of our planet, its processes and its interactions with human activities and ecosystems, and translate that knowledge into solutions for society.
Europe has now a unique opportunity to lead the global scientific efforts to address these challenges. Europe is developing on the most comprehensive and sophisticated space-based observation infrastructure in the world, including the Copernicus Sentinels series, the ESA’s Earth Explorers, the upcoming meteorological missions and novel satellites launched by national space agencies and private operators in Europe. This comes at the time where the global economy turns into digitalisation in an abrupt way departing from the traditional wealth creation of the 20th and 19th century and making information the fuel of our societies.
Ensure the scientific community takes full advantage from this unique opportunity and maximise its scientific and societal impact is urgent and will require a significant collaborative effort. The synergistic use of EO satellite data, in-situ and citizen observations, advanced modelling capabilities, artificial intelligence, and new HPC and cloud computing technologies will be essential elements.
Sharing this vision, in January 2020, the European Commission and the European Space Agency launched a joint Earth System Science Initiative aiming at joining forces to advance Earth System Science and its contribution to respond to the global challenges that society is facing in the onset of this century.
This event is an invitation to scientists, research institutions, policy makers, innovators, industry, ESA activities and Horizon Europe projects to participate in such initiative and contribute to advance science for a green and sustainable society.
This event focuses on:
Reviewing the latest advances in EO and Earth System Science across domains and specially to showcase the latest ESA and EC funded results, projects (e.g., ESA Science Clusters), and initiatives as a basis for networking and interdisciplinary science.
Coordinating European scientific efforts to advance Earth System Science as the key enabler to address some of the major challenges that society is facing in the onset of this century.
Exploring opportunities to line up scientific activities, fostering networking and collaborative research across teams and projects in Europe;
Exploring funding opportunities offered by ESA FutureEO and EC Horizon Europe programmes for collaborative research in Earth system science.
Coordinate efforts to foster the scientific excellence of Europe in the international scientific arena, providing a coordinated contribution to major international scientific efforts, initiatives and programmes;
Discuss and identifying major scientific challenges and research needs and define key scientific priorities that may drive new collaborative activities of ESA and EC in the coming years.
Exploring opportunities offered by latest technologies and Open science to share expertise, data and resources ensuring that the results may be bigger than the sum of the parts. Exploring opportunities to foster the transfer of latest results in science to operational programmes such as Copernicus and DestinE.