Fostering the response capacities and increasing the cooperation of European Public Buyers in Environmental Observation (space, in situ, citizen observation) and Climate adaptation and mitigation policies and action is of decisive importance for strengthening the climate resilience of European societies in light of the multiple climate hazards calling for close cooperation of public authorities. PROTECT project was intended as a preparatory action to a future Pre-Commercial Procurement (PCP) project in the area of climate adaptation services using EO data. It aimed at identifying the needs for a PCP action as a means to develop new and innovative climate change adaptation solutions based on EO. PROTECT created a community of 120 procurers and used the EAFIP methodology and a cross sectoral approach to identify their climate challenges and helped them formulate concrete needs for smart and innovative solutions. The PROTECT focused on five application domains: Agriculture, Forestry and other Land uses, Marine and Coastal Environments, Energy and Utilities, Civil Securty and Protection, and Sustainable Urban Communities. These domains are aligned with the sustainability goals outlined in Horizon Europe’s Cluster 6. Eventually, four pressing challenges were selected where innovation is needed and that can be tackled through a PCP: Floods, Fires, Water, and Infrastructures challenges. To finetunes these challenges and needs and define functional requirements for the future innovation to be developed, several PCP preparatory activites were implemented, namely, 9 pain point workshops and 4 online Open Market Consultations with procurers. In addition, a set of awareness-raising and capacity-building activities were developed to build procurers' knowledge in the area of EO, Innovation Procurement and Climate Adapation.This resulted in an important result of PROTECT, which is the PROTECT Toolkit of resources. To make sure that PCP is the best approach to tackle these challenges, PROTECT assessed existing solutions and R&D efforts of more than 200 EO and Climate Servies providers throughout the EU and conducted a State of The Art Analysis of the market for EO-based climate services to verify that no solution to these challenges and needs is already provided by the market. This activity resulted into the creation of an e-catalogue of climate services providers, a taxonomy of climate services in the five application domain studies by PROTECT and 4 e-pitching sessions organised with market providers. These four challenges were further connected and framed under the umbrella of Water Management challenge which was the subject of one of the PCP application submitted in response to the PCP call on 28 Febuary 2024. By engaging with a broad and diverse community of procurers and providers, the project identified and aggregated the needs and functional requirements for a future new and innovative Climate Services in the area of Water Intelligence Management System, helped promote a ‘buying with impact’ approach and contribute to a clearer and less fragmented demand to guide and support future R&D in the area of EO-based Climate services.
