Users in transport and infrastructure apply to all manufacturing and physical supply in land but also marine domains including transport & logistics, utilities, construction, communication & connectivity, and tourism.
EO/GI users in construction include construction companies, civil engineering consultancies, architect and design companies, planning authorities, and national land agencies.
They benefit from EO through monitor building development, assess environmental impact of human activities, map and assess flooding, detect land movement, subsidence, heave, and monitor land-use statistics
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.
The users in smart cities are multiverse and include large number of profiles. This include urban planners, architects, spatial planning offices, urban policy makers, transportation/environment/health departments but also citizen themselves.
The users benefit from additional information and knowledge extracted from EO data. This information and knowledge can help them to better tackle with challenges arising from climate change and urbanization. As each urban area is unique, EO can provide relevant information by detecting, evaluating and measuring these localities.
This EO based information can be extracted on one occasion or continuously, benefiting from revisiting satellites. EO can support investigation of archive data to extract trends or by investigating current state to set a baseline. This baseline is then further used to monitor the changes or to assess the impact of different decisions and actions. In most cases, this information is further used in various GIS analyses or modelling procedures.
The topics where EO can contribute are as follows: urban land cover, urban heat islands, air/water/soil quality, tree/vegetation health, detection of invasive vegetation species, damage detection on buildings or infrastructure, development of infrastructure and many more.
As listed, EO can support various domains that can be fitted under Nature-based solutions (NBS). NBS have been gaining attention as multifunctional solutions that may help cities to address challenges arising from climate change and urbanization.
The concept of Nature-based Solutions (NBS) has evolved as an umbrella concept embracing concepts such as green/blue/nature infrastructure, ecosystem approach, ecosystem services or natural systems agriculture, natural solutions, ecosystem-based approaches, and ecological engineering. NBS can include solutions such as water purification, reduction of flood risk, or deliberate efforts to decrease temperature and improve air quality.
EO provides timely, continuous and independent data for monitoring indicators of the progress of the society in various societal challenges.
EO monitoring supports activities that address societal & environmental challenges. This happens indirectly along a chain: e.g. a regularly provided EO information product derived from EO data of a satellite is integrated as a parameter in a climate model / Earth system model. This climate model enables the development of regulations (and their enforcement through constant monitoring) to implement climate change mitigation measures. Thereby, the chain is characterized by seveal connected nodes: from societal challenges to use cases of users to EO applications to EO products to specific satellites and their sensors.
[Communities that promote collaboration among diverse stakeholders from academia, industry, public administration as well as local residents]
Scientific agendas address societal challenges and the EO/GI community can contribute to them. Consortia usually include experts from academia (researchers, developers, scientists), EO companies, and members from the user community such as public authorities.
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.
Worldwide countries follow a digital agenda for the economy and initiatives to foster new skills among the workforce to cope with transformation processes with massive impact on the labour market.
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.