EC-ESA JOINT EARTH SYSTEM SCIENCE INITIATIVE

In the next decades, population growth is expected to amplify current pressures on critical resources such as fresh water or food, intensify the stress on land and marine ecosystems and increase environmental pollution and its impacts on health and biodiversity. Global warming and the increasing impacts of climate change, especially on most vulnerable populations, will further exacerbate these problems.

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.

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, EC and ESA 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.

Objectives

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 funding opportunities offered by ESA FutureEO and EC Horizon Europe programmes for collaborative research in Earth system science

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.

Themes

Themes shall focus on different aspects of Earth system science and specially some of the key Flagship activities identified by EC and ESA as key priorities for collaborative research:

• Ocean
• Carbon
• Polar changes and regional and global impacts
• Climate adaptation – Extremes, multi-hazards and compound events
• Biodiversity
• Agriculture under pressure

For further information, please go to the main website at https://essi2023.esa.int/