Translation of "Les techniques spatiales et l'environnement terrestre " (French → English) :

Summary code: Environment and climate change / Air pollution / Land motor vehicles / All motor vehicles Internal market / Single Market for Goods / Motor vehicles / Technical harmonisation for motor vehicles / Technical harmonisation in the internal market Internal market / Single Market for Goods / Motor vehicles / Interactions between the automobile industry and specific policies / Interaction with environmental policy Transport / Transport, energy and the environment / Biofuels and emissions reduction

A number of challenges in space technologies have parallels to terrestrial challenges, for example in the fields of aeronautics, energy, environment, telecommunications and ICTs , natural resource exploration, sensors , robotics, advanced materials , security and health.

4. Reaffirms the importance of GMES, the Earth observation system, as an essential tool in combating climate change and environmental degradation; notes that, through the acquisition and analysis of information at national, regional and global level, GMES will allow the extraction of precise and useful data for: atmospheric, marine and land monitoring, civil protection, risk prevention, early warning systems, emergency management and recovery operations following environmental, natural or man-made disasters, maritime and costal surveillance, agricultural development, water and soil management and regional planning, making use of innovat ...[+++]ive environmental assessment and reporting technology capable of combining spatial and in-situ data; underlines the importance of GMES’s contribution to achieving Europe 2020 objectives and to supporting growth and the green economy, as well as long-term investments in technology and infrastructure, which are the priorities of the European Union and all Member States strongly committed to environmental policy;

(9) In its Communication of 12 November 2008 entitled "Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES): we care for a safer planet", the Commission outlined its approach to the governance and financing of GMES and indicated its intention to delegate technical implementation of GMES to specialised entities, including ESA for the GMES space component owing to its unique position and expertise.

There exists at present a skeleton of spatial data infrastructure through the INSPIRE initiative, ESDI (European Spatial Data Infrastructure), GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) and GEOSS (Global Earth Observing System of System).

Though, one could have probably be tempted to assume that decades of European integration and of a common EU environmental policy would have led to a high level of standardisation and interoperability in the area of spatial data collection, serious barriers to exploit existing spatial information on Community level continue to exist, due to technical and socio-economic characteristics of spatial information.