Project description
Assessing environmental law infringements
Victims exposed to infringements of environmental law may encounter difficulties when it comes to assessing the damage they are suffering from. To tackle this challenge, the EU-funded SME I – CYBELE project aims to analyse satellite data to assess issues such as deforestation, threats to protected habitats, maritime pollution and soil pollution. These data will be processed in a report for the attention of a judge. The project will also work on producing automated reports via a software as a service (SaaS) platform and will help to identify users’ needs in the environmental legal market, in terms of imagery and processing.
Objective
While environmental legislations have multiplied across the globe, too often they mostly exist on paper. In Europe only, the gap between policies and practices costs society €50bn per year. The absence of available and reliable data to constitute evidence remains a major obstacle for the enforcement of environmental law. To face this challenge, we developed a market-creating innovation to help victims proving infringement of environmental law and/or assess the damage they suffered.
We analyse satellite data to produce reports carefully designed to be directly presented in front of a judge. The applications range from operational monitoring of deforestation & threats to protected habitats, maritime pollution as well as soil pollution. Targeted clientele covers all professionals seeking to have quick access to imagery proving infringement evidence in the frame of their environmental litigation case. Overall, we estimated our total addressable market (TAM) at 537M€/y.
Currently, we serve legal professionals seeking to prove illegal mining activities or prohibited forest exploitation (CybELE reports). In parallel, we are developing a new digital solution to detect illegal environmental activity (Cybele SaaS platform). A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) reaching TRL 7, the Platform of Observation for SEa investigations Deducted by Optical Network (POSEIDON), has been developed to constitute the first segment of the CybELE platform.
Our business strategy is to progressively shift from tailormade reports to automated products directly available via the SaaS platform. The general business model may be summarized as a “one-to-many cloud-based SaaS (Software As A Service) ensuring the distribution of EO legal environmental products and services to the B2G and B2B markets ”.
The focus of the project is to better identify the needs of the end-users on the EO environmental legal market in term of imagery and processing and to precise the specification of the SaaS platform.
Fields of science
- engineering and technologymechanical engineeringvehicle engineeringaerospace engineeringsatellite technology
- social scienceseconomics and businessbusiness and managementbusiness models
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringinformation engineeringtelecommunicationstelecommunications networksoptical networks
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesenvironmental sciencespollution
- social scienceslaw
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
1150-155 LISBOA
Portugal
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.