SCO International has great potential to become an important decision making tool on preparedness, adaptation, and resilience to the impacts of climate change at the local and regional levels by helping projects analyzing local needs, translating them into interoperable databases and devising operational responses.
The Space Climate Observatory (SCO) International Initiative was created in June 2019 by a group of space agencies and international organizations with the goal of providing end users the capacity and tools to study, monitor, and adapt to the impacts of climate change through the use of satellite-based EO tools alongside field data and models. Space Agencies, as SCO Partners, are responsible for nurturing SCO projects in their own country as well as for helping to structure their national SCO and/or regional SCO.
The SCO International initiative will continue to operate in tandem with climate change programmes and initiatives, supporting and accelerating work already underway within our space and scientific communities, as well as actions on the ground led by international organizations, such as the UN. Current ongoing projects are focusing on monitoring agriculture, air quality, water management, coastal areas, mountain areas, forests, health, urban areas, thereby the SCO covers most of the GEO initiatives and flagship activities.
“The inertia of the climate system is such that it will be impossible to halt the trend of global warming before 2050, meaning that territories are going to have to learn living with higher temperatures, rising sea level and possibly the spread of exotic diseases to temperate regions. It is to address local needs that CNES launched the SCO initiative combining the expertise of the world’s space agencies to supply satellite data that will serve to model the impacts of climate change on specific territories.”
Jean-Yves Le Gall, CNES President