Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ERA-PLANET (The European network for observing our changing planet)
Reporting period: 2017-07-01 to 2022-01-31
ERA-PLANET “the European Network for Observing our Changing Planet” is an ERA-NET co-funded action under the EU Horizon 2020 Framework Programme (Grant Agreement number 689443), which aimed to strengthen the coordination of European research in the field of Earth Observation (EO) for the implementation of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO, https://www.earthobservations.org/index.php) Work Programme, and Copernicus, the European Union’s Earth Observation programme (www.copernicus.eu).
ERA-PLANET prepared and launched a two-stage joint transnational call to fund projects under the following Strands:
● Smart cities and resilient societies addressing issues such as urban growth, air quality, disasters, health, contaminated sites.
● Resource efficiency and environmental management including water, energy, food security, biodiversity.
● Global change and Environmental treaties addressing global observing systems for toxic and persistent pollutants, harmonization of monitoring and coupled atmosphere-ocean-terrestrial models, evaluation of ecosystem response to regional/global emission changes, and support of policy implementation. Climate being one of the major variables to be considered in assessing changes in pollutant cycling and the analysis of policy scenarios.
● Polar areas and natural resources in highly climate-sensitive regions, including the evaluation of the impact of energy resource exploitation, the impact of long-range transport of air pollutants and their atmospheric deposition, air-surface exchange mechanisms, and environmental pressure from increasing anthropogenic activity in areas with sensitive ecosystems.
After the evaluation process, four projects were selected by independent external experts. They were:
• SMart URBan Solutions for air quality, disasters and city growth, SMURBS
• Essential Variables workflows for resource efficiency and environmental management, GEOessential
• Integrated Global Observing Systems for Persistent Pollutants, iGOSP
• Integrative and Comprehensive Understanding on Polar Environments, iCUPE
The four projects started their activity on September 1st 2017 and ended on August 31st 2021, including 1-year extension reported in the amendment AMD-689443-169.
ERA-PLANET prepared and launched a two-stage joint transnational call to fund projects under the following Strands:
● Smart cities and resilient societies addressing issues such as urban growth, air quality, disasters, health, contaminated sites.
● Resource efficiency and environmental management including water, energy, food security, biodiversity.
● Global change and Environmental treaties addressing global observing systems for toxic and persistent pollutants, harmonization of monitoring and coupled atmosphere-ocean-terrestrial models, evaluation of ecosystem response to regional/global emission changes, and support of policy implementation. Climate being one of the major variables to be considered in assessing changes in pollutant cycling and the analysis of policy scenarios.
● Polar areas and natural resources in highly climate-sensitive regions, including the evaluation of the impact of energy resource exploitation, the impact of long-range transport of air pollutants and their atmospheric deposition, air-surface exchange mechanisms, and environmental pressure from increasing anthropogenic activity in areas with sensitive ecosystems.
After the evaluation process, four projects were selected by independent external experts. They were:
• SMart URBan Solutions for air quality, disasters and city growth, SMURBS
• Essential Variables workflows for resource efficiency and environmental management, GEOessential
• Integrated Global Observing Systems for Persistent Pollutants, iGOSP
• Integrative and Comprehensive Understanding on Polar Environments, iCUPE
The four projects started their activity on September 1st 2017 and ended on August 31st 2021, including 1-year extension reported in the amendment AMD-689443-169.
The main activity performed in ERA-PLANET was the implementation of the four funded projects whose results can be summarised as follows:
● SMURBS managed to consolidate its position as an authoritative EO ambassador in dealing with the smart and sustainable city domain, and in the EO community as a reference project that created the necessary bridges with the growing ecosystem of smart cities. Following a mostly bottom-up approach in several European cities, SMURBS revisited the smart city concept via leveraging state-of-the-art EO provided by its wide consortium, which in turn was enriched by assimilating smart-city methods to ultimately enhance environmental and societal resilience to collectively selected, specific urban pressures. It advocated for EO being an integral part of a smart and resilient city and demonstrated the potential of synergies between different EO platforms and their added value compared to the individual use of those data. It made clear the criticality of the ongoing global endeavours to incorporate in situ data more efficiently into the EO ecosystem, as well as the substantial widening of the EO definition to include modelling as the linking constituent between observational platforms.
● GEOEssential demonstrated the potential to extend the concept of Essential Variables (EVs) across the different topics of GEO, and to implement functional workflows linking dynamically available data sources to final environmental policy indicators through EVs. Several holistic approaches are based on the description of socio-ecological systems to address the sustainability challenge. Essential Variables (EVs) have the potential to support these approaches by describing the status of the Earth system through monitoring and modelling.
● iGOSP demonstrated that there is significant interest in gaining additional insights into the cycling of persistent pollutants (such as persistent organic pollutants (POPs) under the Stockholm Convention and mercury (Hg) under the Minamata Convention on Mercury) through integration of EO and in-situ data. This action laid the foundation for extension of the use of available satellite data to further our understanding on the environmental cycling of persistent pollutants.
● iCUPE not only improved our understanding of pollution sources and sinks, environmental and anthropogenic changes, and elements of the polar regions, but also provided comprehensive long-term measurements, intensive campaigns and satellite data (both collected during the project lifetime and provided by on-going international initiatives).
● SMURBS managed to consolidate its position as an authoritative EO ambassador in dealing with the smart and sustainable city domain, and in the EO community as a reference project that created the necessary bridges with the growing ecosystem of smart cities. Following a mostly bottom-up approach in several European cities, SMURBS revisited the smart city concept via leveraging state-of-the-art EO provided by its wide consortium, which in turn was enriched by assimilating smart-city methods to ultimately enhance environmental and societal resilience to collectively selected, specific urban pressures. It advocated for EO being an integral part of a smart and resilient city and demonstrated the potential of synergies between different EO platforms and their added value compared to the individual use of those data. It made clear the criticality of the ongoing global endeavours to incorporate in situ data more efficiently into the EO ecosystem, as well as the substantial widening of the EO definition to include modelling as the linking constituent between observational platforms.
● GEOEssential demonstrated the potential to extend the concept of Essential Variables (EVs) across the different topics of GEO, and to implement functional workflows linking dynamically available data sources to final environmental policy indicators through EVs. Several holistic approaches are based on the description of socio-ecological systems to address the sustainability challenge. Essential Variables (EVs) have the potential to support these approaches by describing the status of the Earth system through monitoring and modelling.
● iGOSP demonstrated that there is significant interest in gaining additional insights into the cycling of persistent pollutants (such as persistent organic pollutants (POPs) under the Stockholm Convention and mercury (Hg) under the Minamata Convention on Mercury) through integration of EO and in-situ data. This action laid the foundation for extension of the use of available satellite data to further our understanding on the environmental cycling of persistent pollutants.
● iCUPE not only improved our understanding of pollution sources and sinks, environmental and anthropogenic changes, and elements of the polar regions, but also provided comprehensive long-term measurements, intensive campaigns and satellite data (both collected during the project lifetime and provided by on-going international initiatives).
According to the proposed vision for the ERA-PLANET follow-on we suggest a potential set of research and innovation activities aimed to reinforce the science-evidence component of policy-oriented multidisciplinary applications, which can have an impact on and enhance Earth Observation activities in the European Research Area on.
These activities would include, without being limited to:
● Enhancing the EO / in-situ data ecosystem. This would be a direct contribution to the creation of European data spaces (e.g. the Common European Green Deal data space) and an indirect contribution to deliver effective and trusted tools including Digital Twins.
● Supporting the transition from EO data to Earth system knowledge for decision-makers. This would be a direct contribution to the creation of an effective and efficient science-policy interface.
● Contribution to the European Key Enabling Technologies for the EO data value-chain. This would be a direct contribution to the “A Europe fit for Digital Age” priority.
● Reinforcing EO data exploitation by public awareness and democratic spread of information on the state of social, economic and environmental conditions by:
o providing storage and analytical capacities to European SMEs;
o increasing the availability of open source EO data.
● Demonstrating the transferability of ERA-PLANET activities in other domains and its competence to combine activities towards more complex or more targeted challenges.
o Multi-policy issues: How to address multiple policy targets investigating their coherence - e.g. how can we feed the people and save biodiversity at the same time? It is important to ensure that by solving one problem we do not make further problems which are more difficult to resolve. There is a need to target win-win scenarios and test the interplay between different policies.
These activities would include, without being limited to:
● Enhancing the EO / in-situ data ecosystem. This would be a direct contribution to the creation of European data spaces (e.g. the Common European Green Deal data space) and an indirect contribution to deliver effective and trusted tools including Digital Twins.
● Supporting the transition from EO data to Earth system knowledge for decision-makers. This would be a direct contribution to the creation of an effective and efficient science-policy interface.
● Contribution to the European Key Enabling Technologies for the EO data value-chain. This would be a direct contribution to the “A Europe fit for Digital Age” priority.
● Reinforcing EO data exploitation by public awareness and democratic spread of information on the state of social, economic and environmental conditions by:
o providing storage and analytical capacities to European SMEs;
o increasing the availability of open source EO data.
● Demonstrating the transferability of ERA-PLANET activities in other domains and its competence to combine activities towards more complex or more targeted challenges.
o Multi-policy issues: How to address multiple policy targets investigating their coherence - e.g. how can we feed the people and save biodiversity at the same time? It is important to ensure that by solving one problem we do not make further problems which are more difficult to resolve. There is a need to target win-win scenarios and test the interplay between different policies.