Globally, there is increased concern of the potential impacts of extreme climate events and their impact on loss and damage of people, assets and property as a result of these events. Therefore, natural partners in using climate services to assess risk are the Global Insurance Sector, who are key implementers in increasing societies resilience and recovery of extreme events and who are integral, co-design partners in this programme. This project intends to operationalize a system, called the Oasis Loss Modelling Framework, that combines climate services with damage and loss information and provides a standardised risk assessment process that can assess potential losses, areas at most risk and quantify financial losses of modelled scenarios. We intend to prove the Oasis LMF system through undertaking a range of demonstrators linked and co-designed to ‘real’ situations and end-user communities in the insurance, municipalities and business sectors (see list of partners & collaborators). These demonstrators have already been agreed with our end-users and develop work around hydro-climatic risk (in the Danube Region), Typhoon Risk, African Farmer Risk – through using climate information to support the underwriting of micro-insurance, climate v health and climate v forest asset risk assessment. We also intend to further expand access by all sectors to the models, tools and services developed within this programme and the broader climate services sector by operationalizing an open eMarket place and matchmaking facility for catastrophe and climate data and models, tools and services and through broadening awareness in the climate modelling and end-users communities to the Framework, and the transparent and comparable standard it offers to support evidence based risk assessment and adaptation planning.

E2mC aims at demonstrating the technical and operational feasibility of the integration of social media analysis and crowdsourced information within both the Mapping and Early Warning Components of Copernicus Emergency Management Service (EMS). The Project will develop a prototype of a new EMS Service Component (Copernicus Witness), designed to exploit social media analysis and crowdsourcing capabilities to generate a new Product of the EMS Portfolio. The purpose of the new Copernicus Witness Service Component is to improve the timeliness and accuracy of geo-spatial information provided to Civil Protection authorities, on a 24/7 basis, during the overall crisis management cycle and, particularly, in the first hours immediately after the event. This will result in an early confirmation of alerts from running Early Warning Systems as well as first rapid impact assessment from the field. The technological enabler of the Copernicus Witness is the innovative and scalable Social&Crowd (S&C) Platform, developed by E2mC. Heterogeneous social media data streams (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram,… and different data: text, image, video, …) will be analysed and sparse crowdsourcing communities will be federated (crisis specific as Tomnod, HOT, SBTF and generic as Crowdcrafting, EpiCollect,…). Two demonstration loops will validate the usefulness of Copernicus Witness and the S&C Platform suitability to allow EC to evaluate possible Copernicus EMS evolution options. E2mC will perform demonstrations within realistic and operational scenarios designed by the Users involved within the Project (Civil Protection Authorities and Humanitarian Aid operators, including their volunteer teams) and by the current Copernicus EMS Operational Service Providers that are part of the E2mC Consortium. The involvement of social media and crowdsourcing communities will foster the engagement of a large number of people in supporting crisis management; many more citizens will become aware of Copernicus.

Efforts to monitor and map changes of forest areas using Earth Observation (EO) technologies to support decision making in reversing deforestation/degradation has been increasing in the past decade. This has especially gained momentum due to key developments for example in the United Nations Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) policy process related to countries reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) which requires an assessment of national historical and projected deforestation/degradation rates and statistics. The advent of the European Copernicus Programme’s Sentinel data with their high spatial resolution and revisit time at global, regional and national levels provides an unprecedented volume of data for improved forest monitoring which should be exploited by the European science and EO industry communities. The current Project aims to implement a co-ordination and consolidation of the existing European Capacity for EO based Forest Monitoring with relevant stakeholders, International Agencies, Research Community and Private Sector. A key outcome of the Project would then be a proposed framework for a Copernicus REDD+ Service which can make use of the planned Copernicus Data and Information Access Services (C-DIAS) Platform for improving EO data and product accessibility and functionality to end Users. Furthermore the identification of infrastructural and research gaps for EO Forest Monitoring on different scales (global to local) will result in the definition of future R&D Programmes addressing key gaps and priorities.

The Copernicus programme, coordinated and managed by the European Commission, delivers environmental information (largely based on Earth Observation satellite data) in the form of Copernicus Services, addressing six thematic areas: Land, Marine, Atmosphere, Climate Change, Emergency Management and Security. The new Sentinel satellites, recently extended through the successful launch of Sentinel-3, will deliver an unprecedented volume of EO data in high spatial, radiometric and temporal resolution, providing a huge potential for monitoring applications within the Land Monitoring Service - at continental and global scale. The synergistic use of Sentinel-1/2/3 opens up the possibility for new applications, such as the use of time series in the area of Land Monitoring. The ECoLaSS project (Evolution of Copernicus Land Services based on Sentinel data) aims to develop methods and algorithms for pre-operational prototypes improving and developing future specific Copernicus Land services. These prototypes, representing new or improved Copernicus Land Cover and Land Use products, will be demonstrated by means of test/demonstrations sites distributed over Europe and Africa, representing multiple bio-geographic regions and biomes. Prototypes will be designed with high spatial and thematic accuracy, in a timely manner for a pan-European operational Roll-out with the potential for global applications. ECoLaSS will promote the innovation potential of new land monitoring services and applications and might thus contribute to a growing “Copernicus Economy” by boosting (new) Copernicus CORE Land Services and value-added applications (Downstream Services). It is expected, that such new services will bring new opportunities with a wide range of dedicated applications to the market from 2020 onwards and thus significantly contribute to a positive evolution of the Copernicus Land services.