Earth observation services are crucial in emergencies
In recent years, security-related projects funded by the EU such as G-MOSAIC had outlined geospatial crisis management services and identified related gaps in the hope of furthering the sector. This required more research and development to transform these concepts into operational products and services. Building on previous projects, the EU-funded G-SEXTANT (Service provision of geospatial intelligence in EU external actions support) project addressed technological and governance-related gaps in order to develop a standardised portfolio of EO products and services. It aimed to support the geospatial information needs of EU external action users and stakeholders, such as the European External Action Service (EEAS). This includes mapping and EO products ready for deployment during emergencies and crises. To achieve this, the project partners conducted trials in six key scenarios that cover services for security applications: humanitarian crises, natural resources, land conflict situation awareness, nuclear activities, illicit crop monitoring and border surveillance beyond the EU. The project results also considered feedback from users to improve the final operational EO products and services. After defining user scenarios, the project began delivering pre-operational services and receiving requests from users. These services included event-driven responses and periodic or non-event-driven responses. This was followed by the development of technological tools and thematic studies for each scenario. In 2015 the project co-organised a workshop in Belgium for users from the United Nations, EU ministries and civil organisations to encourage interaction, experience sharing and dialogue. At the end of the workshop, the European Union Satellite Centre unveiled the future service deployment operational roadmap and next steps in the field. The project’s work will no doubt contribute to developing functioning products and services that support intelligence from satellite-based EO data. The security user community stands to greatly benefit from the project’s outcomes, resulting in better protection for European citizens.
Keywords
Earth observation, early warning, crisis management, G-SEXTANT, geospatial
