GMES

Europe’s commitment to promote sustainable and global governance requires reliable, timely and independent information. The GMES initiative represents a concerted attempt to produce better policy-relevant information.

GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment & Security) is a joint initiative of the European Commission (EC) and the European Space Agency (ESA), addressing growing concern among European policy-makers to have reliable access to information on the environment at global, regional and local level, with emphasis on global change, environmental stress, natural and man-made disasters, management of resources and the security of the citizen.

GMES was set up following the EC’s call, at the Gothenburg Summit in June 2001, for the establishment of a European capacity for global monitoring of environment and security. An ambitious project, GMES aims to establish the foundations for more efficient collection, integration, and use of geographical information and observations on the state of the environment collected by space-based, airborne and terrestrial systems and methods, and to develop innovative resources and applications. Its potential and range could be significantly increased through combining with positioning systems and telecommunication satellites.

Technologies in the service of community policies

Priority service areas have been identified. These include: land management (agricultural policies, soil protection, management of natural resources, monitoring of bio-diversity, urban planning); ocean monitoring (to improve understanding of climate change, support sustainable management of fisheries resources, maritime transport surveillance); atmosphere monitoring (analysis of weather events, measurement of pollutants); water resource management; risk management (against natural and industrial hazards); humanitarian aid and security policies.

These various services will require the use of specific Earth observation systems, in particular sensor technologies such as high- and medium-resolution, optical and radar imagers for land surface, coastal zone and ocean monitoring; advanced optical and microwave sensors for atmospheric composition measurements and advanced active and passive microwave instruments for ocean monitoring. Combining these systems with other observation data collection systems will require the promotion and development of interoperability, data management and communications infrastructure.

GMES will ultimately contribute to a worldwide Global Earth Observation System of Systems.