EMECO

UK invests in monitoring the health of the planet

27 November 2008

The UK is to invest £82m in the European Space Agency's flagship Global Monitoring for Environment & Security (GMES) programmes, and a new ESA facility is to be based in the UK.

Professor Alan Thorpe, Chief Executive of NERC, said, "I'm very pleased that the negotiations on the second segment of the GMES space component have had such a positive outcome. GMES and the associated Essential Climate Variables programme will provide vital observations of environmental change, informing UK policies. The new UK ESA facility will have a climate change component, representing a real opportunity for the UK environmental science community."

The GMES programme consists of five families of satellites, called Sentinels, which will monitor our oceans, atmosphere, land surface and polar-regions. They will provide unique information on the causes and impacts of changes to sea-level, glaciers, land cover, soil moisture, forest biomass, ocean circulation and atmospheric composition.

The Global Monitoring of Essential Climate Variables programme will provide data on a range of key climate and environmental parameters needed to inform the development of the policy agenda within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It is envisaged that the new UK ESA facility will play an important role in the programme's implementation.

GMES has been developed by ESA and the European Commission to pull together all Earth observation data gathered from space and from non-space sensor networks on Earth. The programme is crucial to the understanding of how our climate is changing and for predicting and reducing the impact of natural disasters. It will provide the scientific evidence needed for policy-makers to develop environment and climate policies in Europe and globally.