GMES approved by the European Parliament

Posted by patrick_maue on June 19, 2010 under News | Be the First to Comment

“This European initiative will provide Europeans with information that can be used to further improve their quality of life through a better knowledge of the living environment, delivering the necessary information to fight climate change, respond to emergencies, and alert citizens if air quality gets bad, to cite a few examples. Recently, GMES has also been used to help rescue operations in Haiti and fight the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The European Parliament has taken an important step in the legislative process”, said Vice-President Antonio Tajani. (link)

With its approval  by the European Parliament, the GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security)  initiative has take an important step.

The approval of the Parliament gave green light to the development of the GMES system by 2014, which would enable the EU to collect its own data – most of which currently comes from American satellites. The adopted regulation contains a provision for open and free of charge access to the collected data, so that all local, regional and national players can use these data to respond to natural disasters, to monitor climate change as well as to take better decisions on agriculture, forestry, energy, urban development, infrastructure or transport. The open access should also boost a “downstream market” for which small and medium-sized software companies can develop new applications.  (link)

This is great news for ENVISION and all other FP7 research projects which focus on applications for earth observation data.