Utilities (water, electricity, waste): Power station operators, Water plants operators, Survey companies, Hydroelectric suppliers, Regulatory Bodies, Distribution companies, Landfill and waste, Regional planners / policy makers.
The benefit from EO information that monitor pollution in rivers and lakes, assess changes in the carbon balance, assess environmental impact of human activities, monitor land pollution, assess changes to urban and rural areas, assess and monitor water quality, assess ground water and run-off.
Climate change observations show the warming of the climate system. The changes since the 1950s are unprecedented over decades to millennia.The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, and sea level has risen. The anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history. Recent climate changes have had widespread impacts on human and natural systems. There is an urgant need for climate action through mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation actions prevent or reduce the emission of greenhuse gases into the atmoshpere with the objective to make the impacts of climate change less severe. Adapting to climate change increases our resilience to impacts like extreme weather events (e.g. hazards like floods and droughts) that get more frequent and intense in many regions. Current climate change will get worse in the future even if the reduction of emissions is effective with negative effects on ecosystems, economy, human health and well-being. There is extensive need for actions to adapt to the impacts of climate change.
EO is used to monitor land ecosystems and biodiversity, environmental impact of human activities, land pollution and vegetation encroachment. A tool for this is land cover mapping and mapping of land cover change about a wide set of categories, lincuding basic forest types, major agricultural surface types, conservation areas, settlements, infrastructure, primary roads, bare soil, water bodies, rivers, wetlands following standard classification schemes according to CORINE or FAO LCCS. Main source are optical EO data and associated pixel-based and object-based image classification methods. For discriminating vegetation classes, they often making use of various vegetation indices and biophysical parameters.