The overall impact of the project has remained true to its origins. A short description of the individual achieved impacts, deviations and lessons learnt are provided in the bullet points below:
• Risk-based enforcement strategies: supervision of large areas has been proved as one of the main opportunities for direct uptake of EO data by enforcement bodies.
• Cost Optimization: It has been proved that EO data, within and outside of this project, is orders of magnitude cheaper than traditional “on-site” inspections. This has been confirmed by project stakeholders and identified as one of the biggest advantages of EO.
• Participation of civil society: even though eLENS portal has been designed to promote the participation of civil society, by implementing tools such as the automated monitoring and alert tools, this impact has not been yet achieved as a widely open access to the portal has not yet been offered to the public. The project has reached a level of maturity of TRL-7 (pre-operational level in controlled tested environment), and therefore only tested by the stakeholders, their end-users, and a selected number of external users. In the future developments expected for the operationalization phase, we plan to open the portal to citizens once reached a TRL-8
• Development of a new market: eLENS has opened a brand-new market for the use of EO in the law domain. Very few countries have accepted EO based evidence in court, therefore the potential for a wide-sectorial uptake is immense.
• Boosting Research & Innovation: In terms of the impact for the consortium partners great benefits in terms of technology roadmap development for GeoVille, Synergise and JSI, as well as innovation in the internal processes brought by eLENS for the stakeholders UICN and DLA Piper
• Education and Awareness: during the project execution, a series of workshops, webinars, demonstrations, etc. have been delivered both to the end-users and to a wider audience. Showcases have been generated and disseminated and it is expected that the educational material will grow in the next phases of the project.
• Health and Quality of life: eLENS goal is to increase the efficiency of environmental law processes with the ultimate objective to improve the health of the planet by preserving it and, indirectly improve the health and quality of life of its citizens.
• Legal domain: eLENS has had and will have a tremendous impact on the legal domain as it will trigger new types of lawyer services (increasing their competitiveness), will enable new type of evidence collection (reducing costs and time efforts), will serve as blue-print for additional front-office services.
