Following the public release of the beta version Green Transition Information Factory (GTIF) demonstrator for Austria one month ago, ESA and the Austrian BMK Ministry invited various Green Transition implementers for a GTIF user consultation workshop in Vienna on March 6th .
More than 125 people from over 40 different organisations attended the event taking place at the premises of BMK, the Federal Ministry for Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology.
The consultation workshop had the objective to (1) gather feedback on current GTIF Austria functionality, (2) collect additional requirements and identify opportunities for GTIF AT evolution, and (3) enhance the GTIF network and facilitate dedicated round table discussions along key TU domains.
First, the audience was invited to learn more about the GTIF concept, scope, current implementation status and evolution planning, including via a practical demonstration of its current capabilities and potential to feed actionable insights to a variety of areas, ranging from site suitability assessment for renewable energies, to status and potential of building roof utilization in cities for creating a more sustainable and resilient urban context (e.g., with green and photovoltaic roofs), to gathering info to try and analyse the links between mobility and air quality, to assessing and quantifying the role of forests in the GHG emissions balance and some of the climate adaptation services.
Following the GTIF demonstration by the ESA team, the core discussion was started within specific domain-related round tables: energy, sustainable cities, mobility and circular economy.
All round tables witnessed excellent participation and the conversation was extremely lively and yielded many new and interesting ideas to consider for the evolution of the Austrian GTIF demonstrator.
On Tuesday the ESA GTIF team was invited to the premises of Verbund AG the largest Austrian energy company. Following a brief demonstration of current GTIF capabilities, in-depth and lively discussion with the Verbund energy experts led to several new requirements and improvement opportunities to be addressed in GTIF evolution.
Altogether, this stakeholder consultation workshop underlined the relevance and demand for EO based analytics and tools that can support various users in understanding and implementing the Green Transition. Many additional requirements were brought forward by experts from various domains. These requirements will now be analyzed, consolidated, and subsequently scheduled for implementation of the GTIF Austria evolution in close coordination with the BMK ministry as the key user and the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) as the key stakeholder.
The GTIF effort does not stop here. Requests to cover additional countries have been brought forward, and enabling comparison and analyses across European countries is a key objectives. The next step is the GTIF kick-starter open ITT that will initiate the development of 3 new national scale GTIF instances and lead to the development of an open innovation approach to scale up GTIF more widely over the next years.
Are you involved or just interested in the EU Green Transition? Would you like to let us collect your ideas? You may like to have a look at the current GTIF beta release and express your view. Send us an email to gtif@esa.int or use any of the FEEDBACK button options to fill in a form or interact via social media.