From ideas to action: how to tackle climate change with space
The recent IPCC report painted a stark picture of climate change, laying the groundwork for discussions that need to take place at next month's COP26. Space could be crucial in our transition towards a sustainable future. But how? We want to turn your novel ideas into concrete actions.
Over the last few decades, space has been instrumental in monitoring climate change. Now we want to go one step further by using space to help achieve our climate neutrality goals and make Europe the first climate neutral continent by 2050.
"Space offers a vast untapped potential to ramp up the fight for a green future and tackle global climate change," says ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher. "It is now time to translate great ideas into concrete actions and leverage their economic potential."
ESA goes green with Agenda 2025
As one of its five goals, Agenda 2025 emphasises boosting commercialisation in Europe's space sector for a green and digital Europe. The Agenda underlines the importance of engaging with dynamic market forces to achieve its ambitious goals, and highlights the important role that private space actors can and should play.
"The new fast-growing markets of green and digital economic recovery offer huge opportunities for business that we must not miss. European space companies should be among the biggest and best space companies, strongly contributing to a greener and more digital economic recovery." – ESA Agenda 2025
"Europe is at the forefront of the fight against climate change and should be the first climate-neutral continent by 2050,” remarks Géraldine Naja, acting Director for Commercialisation, Industrial Policy and Procurement. "We must ensure that ESA, which has also been at the forefront of environmental monitoring from space with the Copernicus programme, continues and even strongly increases its contribution to tackling and mitigating climate change, using innovative ideas and approaches. This is the goal of this new OSIP call."
What kind of ideas are we looking for?
"With this open call for ideas, we want to trigger the creativity of entrepreneurs and businesses," explains Leopold Summerer, Head of ESA's Advanced Concepts and Studies Office. "In particular we will explore with them ideas for commercially viable solutions using space to slow down climate change and help make Europe climate neutral."
ESA Member States have all committed to ambitious actions to address climate change, both through national policies and through the European Green Deal. Whilst green agendas differ in their details, they all aim for similar objectives. The European Green Deal, for example, lists the following high-level actions:
- Transforming our economy and societies
- Making transport sustainable for all
- Leading the third industrial revolution
- Cleaning our energy system
- Renovating buildings for greener lifestyles
- Working with nature to protect our planet and health
Ideas should address one or more of these objectives, whilst being novel. Novelty is the main differentiator in the first step of this call for ideas, while commercial viability will become more important in the second step.
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What will happen to your ideas?
The deadline for ideas is 14 November. Ideas will then be evaluated, and the best will be invited to be matured into proposals for funding. Successful ideas will be implemented either under the Discovery element of ESA’s Basic Activities, or under ESA’s GSTP, InCubed, ARTES or NAVISP programmes.
The call is being run by Discovery through the Open Space Innovation Platform (OSIP), where you can also find full details of the timing, process and conditions.
