Back in 2020, ESA and the DG-RTD of the EC signed a collaboration agreement to “jointly advance Earth system science and its contribution to respond to the global challenges that society is facing in the onset of this century”.
Such cooperation is implemented by fostering scientific collaboration across European teams and projects and supporting ambitious complementary collaborative activities, funded on the EC side through Horizon Europe and on the ESA side through the FutureEO programme.
The recent publication by EC of the Horizon Europe work plan 2023-2024 represented a significant milestone in the cooperation.
The work plan includes several calls encouraging bidders to establish collaborative scientific efforts with ESA-funded activities in the polar sciences, ocean research, terrestrial carbon, methane, could-aerosol interactions, agriculture, and natural hazards contexts. More than 130 million euros in the work plan are earmarked for collaborative activities with ESA projects and teams.
ESA will issue dedicated ITTs to complement such activities: this will be part of the upcoming ESA Science Clusters component of the FutureEO work plan to be published early next year.
As a result, ESA and EC aim at establishing close complementary projects pursuing common overarching goals and objectives in the domain of Earth System Science. ESA focuses on advancing the satellite Earth Observation-related science while EC activities address the problems from a larger perspective, including, for instance, modelling and in-situ observations, among others.
Discover more about the recently released Horizon Europe work plan 2023-2024 in the dedicated pages.