Around 75% of the European external trade transits through European ports. According to the EU Blue Economy Report 2020, in 2018 the established sectors of the EU Blue Economy[1] directly employed about 5 million people and generated around €750 billion in turnover and €218 billion in gross value added.

The cooperation between the space and maritime sector dates back to more than 30 years ago. Satellite data historically provided relevant near-real-time information on weather conditions to improve maritime safety or facilitated communication at sea. Today, thanks to the most recent technological developments, a wide range of activities are starting to rely more on satellite data and services: from meteorology and communications to aquaculture, fisheries, disaster management, and safety and security.

The Blue World Task Force

Over the years, ESA has enlarged its portfolio of collaborative programmes. A holistic approach has been implemented through its Regional Initiatives where relevant space systems and data are bundled together to provide the best possible service or to tackle challenges either at regional level or for a specific community or topic.

The Blue World Task Force (BWTF) covers the principal maritime geographic areas in Europe, from the Mediterranean to the Baltic, passing through the North Sea, the High North and the Black Sea and it has been officially kicked-off in October 2019 as part of this initiatives. A brief concept note providing additional details on the BTWF is available here.

The objective of the newly established task force is to support the definition of future ESA programmes addressing the interests of the Member States. To map how space is used today, to identify existing technological gaps and to collect needs, challenges and opportunities of maritime users’ communities the BWTF launched at the beginning of February a stakeholders’ available online for a month.

A large number of maritime operators from fishing communities to ship owners, port authorities, coastguards, insurance companies, economic and research centres dealing with the blue economy, or involved in studies on the preservation and exploitation of ocean biodiversity, are invited to take this questionnaire available here:

“The challenges of the Blue World” webinar series

To complement the consultation online and to stimulate the dialogue between the space and maritime communities, ESA joined forces with Eurisy to organise “The challenges of the blue world” webinar series.

The series will discuss the existing challenges maritime stakeholders face and how satellite-based solutions respond to their emerging needs. Each webinar will gather around a virtual table local authority, NGOs, research centres, and industrial clusters from space and maritime domains.

Three webinars will be organised during the month of February 2021 addressing three main topics:

• Marine Resources Exploitation. The first webinar will take place Thursday February 18th and will focus on three identified subsectors: aquaculture, fishery and illegal fishing;

Marine resources are threatened by a series of stressors, among which climate change, overexploitation of the natural resources and illegal fishing. Such effects can negatively impact on the sustainable exploitation of the marine living and non-living resources. An example is the over and aggressing fishing. The FAO recently warned that more than a third of the fish stocks are being overfished. The overfishing phenomena reduces fish stocks at a rate that the species cannot replenish leading to lower fish populations and reduced future production.

The first webinar of the series will focus on relevant challenges such as how to ensure a sustainable marine food production and aquaculture, and how prevent the illegal fishing in European waters with the contribution of space technology. The technology perspective and solutions will be provided by a selected European cluster that will provide the participants with up-to-date solutions for the challenges identified.

• Secure Transports and Communication. The second webinar is scheduled for Monday, February 22nd and will highlight the main challenges and issues faced by stakeholders in the field of marine communications, autonomous shipping, and logistics, with insights from shipowners;

Maritime transport and logistics constitute a large component of the blue economy. Shipping, maritime safety and security, as well as the broad range of maritime logistic services, are embracing innovative solutions to optimise their work and to collect reliable and timely information of what happens at sea. Technology is accelerating the process of modernisation of the whole sector, but still a series of challenges will be faced in the upcoming years by maritime operators: improved marine communications, logistics, autonomous shipping are under the lens to understand how to optimise their work them without impacting on the environment and marine world.

The second webinar of the series move the focus on three of the main issues faced by the maritime end- users’ communities: the optimisation of the vessels’ communication among them and with other means of transports, and how to ensure the safety of autonomous vessels. In addition to this, this second webinar will bring the audience the experience of shipowners’ confederation and their needs. As in the first webinar, a European cluster will provide the participants with the existing solutions to respond to their everyday challenges.

• Maritime Spatial Planning. The last webinar of the series will be on Thursday 25th February. It will present the experience of end-users involved in the Maritime Spatial Planning process, such as coastal protection, renewable energy, and port development.

Maritime Spatial Planning is necessary to ensure a sustainable management of oceans and seas. In the era of blue growth multiple users need to take informed decision on how to use sustainably marine resources. Multiple actors are involved in the Maritime Spatial Planning process, from energy actors, to environmental entities, development agencies, but also regional policy and decision makers, are called to consider how to minimize the impacts of their activities on the same sea area. The opportunities that technology offers today can help sea and ocean users to define a coordinated and sustainable approach towards the use of marine resources, preserving the marine ecosystems and biodiversity.

The last webinar of the series will present the needs of three of the main industries involved in Maritime Spatial Planning process, to provide the participants with the experience of policy actors involved in the definition of coastal protection policies; how renewable energy relies on satellite data to manage sea resources; and finally, how the port systems are improving and what challenges exist for the operators. Another European technology cluster will provide the stakeholders and the audience with the useful information to consider the adoption of satellite-based solutions for their needs.

The results of the ESA stakeholder consultation will be available in the second quarter of 2021. The outcomes of the webinar series will, instead, be available on the Eurisy website and social media channels. 

[1] Marine Living and Non-Living Resources, Marine Renewable Energy, Port Activities, Shipbuilding and Repair, Marine Transport, and Coastal Tourism.

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Eurisy (EY): What are the main threats European SMEs are confronted with when it comes to making commercially viable geo-information products from Sentinel data?

Dr. G. Vaitkus (GV): I would like to call out three of them, though of course the situation is more complex than a 3-bullet point list.
1. Stakeholder interests and resistance to changing from “traditional” (human photo-interpreted) geo-information products: Although the efficiency, objectivity, frequency and thematic variety of Copernicus products and services cause no doubts, the traditional mapping methods hold strong positions on an institutional level, with institutional users or even large service providers who are in a position of national monopoly. Annual expenses of the public sector for mapping products and services are certainly large enough for the traditional mapping lobbyists to defend their “economic interests”.

2. European and national legislation and procurement policies are not in line with the most recent technological developments related to Copernicus. In many European countries legislation makes topographic mapping compulsory, focusing national funding on established priorities and methods, which leaves little room for innovation. This is actually the main problem for Copernicus service providers, more than technological competition with traditional mapping methods. Legislators do not seem to be in tune with those in charge of investing European money in innovative mapping methods, like those based on the use of satellite imagery. You would think that these questions of legislation and procurement policies should have preceded the implementation of Copernicus, but nowadays that seems to be an after-thought.

3. Low accessibility of high quality multi-spectral imagery for the European service providers. This is a complex problem, including insufficient spatial resolution and spectral parameters of the imagery publicly available for the GMES/Copernicus initial operations, low revisit frequency (problems with cloud cover), high cost of very high resolution imagery (almost the same as aerial photos), etc. This problem is even worsened by on-line global imaging services like Google or Bing, which provide visualisations derived from very high resolution imagery for the general public globally and for free. So the result is that (1) the mainstream users have an extremely “populist” understanding of what EO technology really is and what information it can provide, at the same time being confident that they already have unlimited and free access to the best available EO technologies and (2) EO industry has serious problems trying to satisfy the expectations of the European (or national) institutional users in terms of high quality EO products and services with the EO data available for the real production. I do hope that Sentinel 2 will at least partially solve the latter problem, but the education of the general public still remains a serious issue for the Copernicus community at all levels.

EY: What about the bright side?

GV: There are a few reasons to remain hopeful.
1. European SME capacity building. During the last years some European companies have indeed developed highly competitive technological capacities for EO services. And — surprisingly — the constraints of the European EO market (weak user community, low budgets, changing specifications, poor imagery, problems with many national projections, etc.), have actually pushed innovation and reinforced the competitiveness of European EO service providers on the global market! 5 years ago the FP7 GMES projects raised very ambitious (at that time) objectives to reduce the land-cover production costs by 20% compared to CORINE Land Cover production based on manual photo-interpretation, or even reduce the production cost down to 1-2 Euro/sq.km for ~10 “core” land cover classes. However, the actual production of GIO-Land layers was done for just a few cents/sq.km per layer — several times cheaper than the original expectations. Despite all the semantic issues, delays, diversity of national projections, inconsistency of EO imagery and other problems, the pan-European production was completed successfully by a collaborative effort of a large group of European companies, coordinated by the European Environment Agency. This achievement gives strong evidence of the competitiveness of the European EO industry and competences of public agencies.

2. The promising prospect of access to global markets. Without exaggeration, European Copernicus service providers have indeed developed a capacity for serious competition on a global market. And, to be honest, the main reason why we (service providers) are so keen to finally have European EO imaging capacity (Sentinels) operating in full power is not because we expect a considerable boost of business opportunities in our own countries, but because we hope that EC will finally develop a political will to start acting as a global player on climate change, deforestation, desertification, water resources, food security and many other issues by launching large scale operational mapping and land/ocean monitoring services on a global scale, like US, Japan, China and other countries. Europe has no problem with innovation, technological capacity or even funding – I believe that with Copernicus services our main problem is lack of political will and coordination… But hopefully that is about to change.

EY: How representative do you think your view is of how SMEs in general perceive Copernicus’ opportunities?

GV: I’m not sure. My point of view – as one of a former scientist and current CEO of a micro-company competing for business in the field of EO services – is probably a pragmatic, business-like approach to the Copernicus programme. I do realise that on a European level this has been a very ambitious project on a larger time-scale than the one I consider, as a small business owner. Long preparation for the Copernicus operational phase through RTD projects demanded a considerable amount of investment and human resources from large EO service providers, but the overall level of GMES initial operations funding apparently didn’t meet expectations of the European EO industry. On the other hand, SMEs are operating on considerably lower level of expenses, therefore long-term Copernicus services and national downstreams provide attractive business opportunities for micro-companies and SMEs.

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