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(June 30th, By Bordelot and Ayazi) NEREUS ‐ The Network of European Regions Using Space Technologies ‐ is an initiative of 23 regions and 40 associate members with the common objective to spread the use and understanding of space technologies across Europe for the benefit of regions and their citizens.

As a voice of European Regions, NEREUS serves as an advocate for matters relating to the use of space technology and also as a direct channel to regional users (such as local authorities, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), universities and research institutes and citizens). The emphasis of the network is on the use of space technologies for Earth observation and monitoring. NEREUS strives to demonstrate and explain the added value of Space technologies as a tool for problem-solving or meeting challenges at regional levels with a direct impact on the daily lives of citizens.

Copernicus (formerly GMES) is one of the priority fields of network cooperation, which led to the creation of an EO/(GMES) Copernicus Working Group that aims to identify and promote regional priorities within the European Copernicus initiative. Copernicus services provide territorial, oceanographic and atmospheric data for the environmental protection and security of Europe’s citizens. Consequently, Copernicus services have a fundamental economic and social impact at the regional level. Copernicus offers important information regarding the state of coasts, forests, land and atmosphere and provides vital support during civil emergencies and natural disasters.

Since its inception, NEREUS has devoted intense communication efforts to make the public increasingly aware of the benefits of space technologies. Interregional collaboration and interaction has stimulated a number of initiatives, making regional space activities more transparent. For example, in 2011, NEREUS launched its NEREUS Space Exhibition: a mobile and vivid poster presentation of 24 NEREUS regions, enriched with a video, and available in all eight native languages of the network. It showcases regional examples of space applications in different domains (security, civil emergency, agriculture, maritime, etc.). Additionally, in 2012, NEREUS started a productive collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA). The first outcome of this collaboration is the production of a publication on 67 uses of Copernicus in Europe’s regions. The publication is meant to be a source of reference for policymakers to understand the social and economic benefits derived from Copernicus services in Europe.

Despite the various Copernicus services and products already available, their take‐up within Local and regional Authorities (LRAs) is still very slow. Against this background, NEREUS and ESA initiated a project titled “Improving GMES/Copernicus take‐up among Local and Regional Authorities via dedicated thematic Workshops.” It aims at launching a dialogue with LRAs, presenting examples of space services and products already available in certain application domains and promoting awareness and learning about possible needs or obstacles for the service deployment. The project is based on the organization of few workshops dedicated to specific topic areas of interest for the European LRAs. In order to identify the workshop topics that are of priority interest for LRAs, an online consultation has been launched

An overall analysis of the outcomes of the series of workshops will be carried out and a final report will be presented and discussed on the occasion of an upcoming event at the European Parliament in Brussels. More information on the project is available here.

In addition to the collaboration with ESA, NEREUS is also a dynamic platform for its members to facilitate their involvement in several EU‐funded activities and mobilize projects and initiatives, often aimed at developing jointly space applications or promoting space uses.

DORIS Net (Downstream Observatory organized by Regions active in Space – Network), was the first EU‐funded project mobilized on the NEREUS platform. Bringing together 13 NEREUS partners, it was nominated as flagship project of the network. The key outcome of the project, which ended in February 2013, is a network of Regional Contact Offices (RCOs) which serve as a meeting/information point among local authorities, providers and potential users of Copernicus services and other stakeholders. Despite the termination of EU‐funding, the RCO‐network still exists and strives to find new ways of funding to ensure its sustainability. Its mission is to increase the use of space technologies, help create business opportunities to demonstrate the broad array of existing Copernicus services at the regional level in Europe, and to boost the use of Copernicus applications. Since July 2011, seven RCOs have been established in NEREUS members regions and some other regions are currently exploring the opportunity to open a new RCO in their territory.

Finally, the dialogue with European institutions is also among the priorities of the network. NEREUS introduces the regional dimension in European space policymaking, and offers a unique platform for regions to share ideas, develop joint strategies, and speak as a sole body with European institutions. As an advocate for regional concerns, NEREUS contributes to the development of new policies and programs.

To quote few examples, with respect to the long and complex debate on the financing of the Copernicus program post -2014 or in the latest EC proposal for a Regulation on establishing a European Earth Observation Programme (Copernicus) ; NEREUS played an important role to highlight the regional perspective and extreme need for a broad use of Copernicus data and services across Europe.

In the second half of 2014, NEREUS will organize its annual General Assembly in Brussels. The 6th Assembly will be an occasion to sum up activities carried out and results achieved as well as to plan for upcoming actions and initiatives.

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The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) formalised their collaboration by signing a collaboration agreement to enhance the development and use of geospatial standards.

The outcome is expected to be a more effective contribution of JRC to the OGC standard process, “and facilitate the consideration of European objectives and requirements during the development of international open geospatial standards” as stated by the announcement of OGC.

Both organizations will benefit from this cooperation in the field of development, application, maintenance and promotion of international open geostandards in relation to the implementation of the INSPIRE directive. According to Mark Reichardt, President and CEO of OGC, OGC benefits from the JRC’s leadership in advancing geospatial information sharing across Europe, enabled by open standards, including those of the OGC. The European Union benefits greatly from open standards that improve discovery, sharing and application of diverse collections of information to address a range of important issues.”

Ms Maria Betti, Director of the JRC’s Institute for environment and Sustainability, for her part affirms that “during the development and implementation of INSPIRE, the JRC has gathered a lot of experience on the implementation of infrastructures for geospatial and environmental data based on interoperability standards – on an unprecedented scale. The joint activities of the OGC and the JRC will be instrumental in feeding this experience into the international standardisation process.”

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Japan has launched two Earth Observation satellites last week to monitor environmental damage near the damaged nuclear plants in Fukushima and Chernobyl, officials said.

Japan has launched two Earth Observation satellites last week to monitor environmental damage near the damaged nuclear plants in Fukushima and Chernobyl, officials said.

The two satellites, Hodoyoshi-3 and Hodoyoshi-4, have been developed by the University of Tokyo for around 300 million yen (about $2.9 million) each. They will take images of the two nuclear power plants and the surrounding environment to be combined with ground-based data including radiation levels.

“I hope that the data will help Japan and Ukraine correctly acknowledge the impact on the environment near the two plants,” project leader Shinichi Nakasuka, from the University of Tokyo, said.

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Natural hazards such as subsidence, rockfalls and landslides can greatly affect safe travelling.

The European Space Agency ESA is now using satellites to monitor hazards across broad areas that could affect road and rail networks.

ESA elaborates: “Traditional monitoring such as photographic mapping to measure changes in the landscape works well for specific locations but is labour intensive and costly. One promising approach is to use maps produced from radar satellites to identify potentially hazardous slopes, followed by repeat monitoring at ground level. By taking regular observations, displacements across large areas can be measured with millimetre accuracy. Any sudden changes in motion indicate a potentially high-risk situation and invite closer scrutiny.”

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After the successful launch of the Polar satellite Launch Vehicle PSLV-23 carrying a payload of five satellites into orbit from Satish Dhawan Space Center in Sriharikota by the Indian Space Research Organization ISRO, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has set out a proposal for a satellite to be developed and tasked exclusively for operation in Southern Asia.

The aim of such a satellite would be to strengthen the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC).

ISRO’s successful launch of payloads developed in France, Germany, Singapore and Canada was seen as a “global endorsement of India’s space capabilities,” as the Prime Minister stressed, and consequently suggested the development of a SAARC satellite, which would be used to support disaster management and sustainable development in the region. “We would dedicate this satellite to our neighborhood as India’s gift… We should share the fruit of this with our neighboring countries,” said Narendra Modi as he was congratulating the scientists behind the launch.

India has gained attention as a player in the multi-billion dollar space industry and has successfully launched 35 foreign satellites into orbit to date.

Read full story at International Business Times

Scientists at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) recently developed a satellite-based map of human settlements, with a precision currently unparalleled by other global surveys. The maps are based on data of the German radar satellites TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X captured from an altitude of 500 kilometres. The imagery has a resolution of three metres allowing to identify even individual buildings.

DLR further elaborates: “The overflights by the two radar satellites, TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X, covered the entire surface of Earth within two years. This was possible as the sibling satellites are able to ‘see’ through clouds and can even record data at night. The team of researchers processed and evaluated a total of 180,000 individual images and more than 308 terabytes of data for the precise Global Urban Footprints project. Previous global evaluations have not been able to record smaller villages, as the resolution of the satellites was no better than 300 metres.”

“Until now there has been no global record of settlement patterns with this kind of regional specificity,” says Thomas Esch from the German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD) within DLR. Since 2008 more people have been living in urban rather than rural areas. Previous estimates suggested that between one and three percent of Earth’s surface is covered by settlements. The initial results of the radar data evaluation show, however, that the proportion of developed areas has been frequently underestimated.

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On 8 July, 2014 Skybox launched the SkySat-2 Earth Observation satellite from Baikonur in Kazakhstan on board a Soyuz-2 Fregat rocket.

The launch of SkySat-2 follows as part of Skybox’s plan to create a 24 satellite constellation collecting high-resolution Earth imagery.

Skybox plans to create a 24 satellite constellation collecting high-resolution Earth imagery.

As EARSC had reported previously, Google recently announced plans to acquire Skybox for $500 million.

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Over 85 million square kilometers of fresh basemap imagery from Airbus Defense and Space is now available in ArcGIS Online. This announcement follows the signing of an agreement between Airbus Defense and Space and Esri for access to select sets of Airbus Defense and Space imagery.

Through this agreement with Esri, ArcGIS Online users will have access to a near global coverage with Airbus Defense and Space’s SPOTMaps 2.5m, seamless mosaic product, as well as very high resolution 50cm Pléiades imagery products over major cities worldwide. These fresh datasets will be used to enhance the existing Esri ArcGIS Online World Imagery Basemap, one of the foundation datasets available worldwide to all Esri users.

The seamless SPOTMaps 2.5 mosaic provides users with a high-end, seamless basemap over most of the world to be used as a backdrop for many GIS applications. This mosaicked data is enhanced by fresh Pléiades imagery, giving ArcGIS Online users updated information over major cities worldwide. Imagery will also be available, on demand, for deployments through the Esri Data Appliance solution, and more will become available through the end of September 2014.

“With this announcement, ArcGIS users will have easier access to really crisp, high resolution imagery,” said Jack Dangermond, President of Esri. “We’ve added over 85M km2 of Airbus Defense and Space SPOTMaps 2.5m seamless, global and current mid-scale imagery over 164 countries to our cloud basemaps, available through ArcGIS Online”.

“We are excited by this partnership with Esri. Thanks to this agreement, ArcGIS Online users will be able to leverage an extensive access to our high resolution, high-end, and, more importantly, fresh basemap content through the Esri platform,” said Bernhard Brenner, Head of the Geo-Intelligence program line of Airbus Defense and Space.

Airbus Defense and Space and Esri will continue to expand their partnership through additional innovative services in order to better serve Esri partners and users worldwide. Stop by the Airbus Defense and Space booth #1215 at Esri UC, in San Diego, July 14-18, 2014 for more information.

Press contact: Fabienne Grazzini: +33 5 62 19 41 19

June 2014, Geneva, Switzerland – Although UNOSAT is mainly known in UN circles for its long standing support to emergency response operations in humanitarian crises, its experts are adamant that the use of satellite derived geospatial information can be a game-changer in assessing vulnerability and estimating risk. In other words there is more about satellites and disaster risk reduction than what meets the eye.

This is not a recent revelation and UNOSAT has been presenting in various instances over the years arguments in support of applying this versatile technology to vulnerability and territorial planning as a means to increase resilience in the face of natural disasters. The Director of Research at UNITAR recalls: “one of the first successes of UNOSAT was a flood risk reduction programme in Central America integrating training, analysis and technical assistance. We used 3-D modelling to create a usable flood vulnerability map that literally changed the way an entire region dealt with their exposure to flood risk”.

Notwithstanding the high technological value of geospatial information for prevention, the camp of response seems to attract more attention from both the public opinion and the experts. “It is because there is more media coverage and faster funding mechanisms”, recognizes Einar Bjorgo who manages the UNOSAT Programme since 2013. “What we are trying to achieve is establish a good workable link between prevention, response and recovery, throughout which satellite analysis and geo-information maintain value and can be used more easily, rather than tilting the balance in favour of prevention or response, as if these two were antithetic”.

In practice UNOSAT has been putting its experience and skills to work to reach out to the community of national experts working around the full crisis management cycle. “At national level”, says Luca Dell’Oro of UNOSAT, “there is little sense in delving on the difference between prevention and response. Experts want to know their vulnerability, how to measure the risk, how to respond efficiently to threats, how to recover from disaster impacts”. UNOSAT has put together a training mix that, according to beneficiaries, helps them do just that, if nothing else in the limited realm of geographic information. “Geospatial Information Systems don’t hold the answer to everything. But they bring complementary information and a certain ease of access that facilitates coordination and efficiency”, continues Dell’Oro.

Eastern Africa and Southeast Asia are UNOSAT current areas of focus for testing this new approach to using technology for resilience. In the framework of the partnership between UNITAR-UNOSAT and UN-ESCAP, the latest example of successful training by UNOSAT happened in the Philippines in April. The learning course was the ‘Capacity Building Training on Applications of GIS and Geospatial Data Management for Disaster Risk Reduction in the Philippines’, organized by UN-ESCAP and Philippine Council for Industry, Energy and Emerging Technology Research and Development (PCIEERD).

The course was customized to meet learning needs of 20 Local Government Operations Officers interested in learning the benefits and limitations of geospatial application for DRR. According to the feedback received after the training, participants have really appreciated case studies and GIS methodologies proposed by UNOSAT for both pre-disaster risk assessment and post-disaster satellite based impact and damage analysis.

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(12 June 2014, Geneva, Switzerland) The UNOG Library Talk of last week in Geneva was dedicated to the launching of the new UNOSAT study on Piracy. This report is the result of five years of research in the area of geospatial information applied to piracy. The research, conducted by UNOSAT experts is the an attempt to look at piracy globally from a geospatial angle, combining mapping and satellite observations to reveal trends and patterns that can only be observed when “looking from above”

The launching took the form of a panel discussion with the participation of the Permanent Representatives to the UN from Somalia and Senegal, the Manager of UNOSAT and the main piracy Researcher from the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law. The Panel was moderated by UNITAR’s Director of Research.

Since 2007 UNOSAT has been tracking piracy off the coasts of Somalia using optical very high resolution imagery and radar data from commercial and scientific satellites. At the outset analysts were responding to requests by humanitarian agencies engaged in Somalia and using chartered vessels to transport vital aid supplies. In time the scope of the investigation widened, leading to regular updates by 2009, which became popular with a number of non-UN users including shipping lines, investigators and naval forces. By 2011, UNOSAT had accumulated a large amount of data and information that led to the study presented on 12 June at the Library of the United Nations.

As Einar Bjorgo explained, looking at piracy on a global scale using a geographic reference system reveals aspects of the phenomenon that are less apparent in conventional research on the subject. The UNOSAT study points at a few trends and highlights interesting facts using maps and easy graphics to convey the information. The Ambassador of Somalia, Yusuf Mohammed Ismail, welcomed the research as timely and enlightening and underlined the link between piracy and the complex situation resulting from poverty, insecurity and illegal fishing in Somali waters. On the other side of the continent, West African countries are faced with a rapid UNOG library talkincrease of piracy activities punctuated by increasingly violent episodes, as underlined by the Ambassador of Senegal, Fode’ Seck. Alice Priddy of the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law explained how the terminology employed in the media affects the perception of the phenomenon and the importance of the legal definitions and legal frameworks relating to piracy and the high seas in general.

UNOSAT is seeking donor support to sustain its research on piracy in support of humanitarian agencies operating in Africa. The study presented to the diplomatic community on 12 June was funded by Sweden and was the occasion for the management of UNOSAT to attract attention to the funding requirements of the Programme to be able to continue its work in this area.

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