Socio-Economic Benefits and Impact of GMES

The socio-economic impact analysis consists in a complete and comprehensive characterisation of the benefits and losses accruing to all principal stakeholders as a result of GMES. This goes beyond a classical cost-benefit analysis, by considering societal benefits, allowing different user categories to access strategic information for internal political and socio-economic matters, improve the European citizen’s involvement in the decision processes and greater capacity for Europe to act on the international scene.

The analysis is addressing four distinct levels of objectives:

• Key benefits to be expected arising from GMES implementation

   

• A political and strategic view of the benefits and impacts due to GMES implementation

   

• Benefits evaluated against cost envelopes from an economic perspective

   

• Variation in benefit resulting from different implementation levels for GMES

   

The scope of the analysis is the direct and in-direct benefits accumulating to all stakeholders affected by GMES. This includes the following constituencies:

• Public sector organisations with statutory requirement or operational mandate to support the elaboration, implementation, monitoring, policing and assessment of environment and security policies at local, regional, national, European and global level;

   

• Public sector organisations that require access to reliable, timely and cost effective information on environment and security issues to manage their own policy implementation (eg agriculture, fisheries, forest management, regional policy, industrial risk managers, civil protection agencies, development support, humanitarian aid coordination etc);

   

• The citizen both as a direct recipient of information (eg to support informed exercising of democratic rights and to have adequate knowledge on exposure to risk) and as indirect beneficiary of improved functioning of public sector organisations acting on their behalf;

   

• European industrial suppliers of environmental and geo-information services (within Europe and elsewhere) better able to meet the terms of the Lisbon objectives as part of a competitive knowledge based economy;

   

• European industrial operators both in response to opportunity created by the availability of new environmental and security information (eg in resource management, insurance, finance, manufacturing etc) and as an operator required to ensure operational practices are consistent with environmental policy in a cost effective manner;

   

• Local, national and European politicians who have better information on environmental and security issues to support improved debate and control for drafting and upgrade of legislation and policy, including independent European information to assess credibility of analyses by other countries;

   

• European scientists having a more comprehensive capacity to assess climate and environmental pressures, drivers and states and can therefore better advise policy makers on requirements for new policies and implementation effectiveness of existing policies;

   

• Regional and global monitoring and assessment programmes which benefit from a wider range of input data due to more effective European participation and improved characterisation of global and regional processes

It is expected that benefits will be realised primarily in one of the following domains (although a critical element of the study will be to validate this):

• Enhanced cost effectiveness in collecting information required by policy and legislative mandate, including optimisation of fragmented national data collection networks;

   

• More accurate decisions with respect to allocation of resources, determination of allowable practices and identification of policy targets;

   

• Expansion of capabilities in areas that were not previously viable due to lack of reliable information;

   

• Intangible benefits (eg support migration of environmental protection policies from confrontational to collaborative implementation, improved citizen participation in democratic processes, enhanced trust in government data)

To ensure effective capture of these benefits, the analyses includes the following techniques:

• Case studies for particular services, users and stakeholders, policy sectors and issues

   

• High level impact assessments at macro-economic level (eg national & European GDP)

   

• Impact modelling at industrial and micro-economic level

   

• Characterisation of analogous developments from other sectors

   

• Organisation of workshops with the participation of key stakeholders