NEREUS and ESA launched their joint publication “The Growing Use of GMES across Europe’s Regions” with a festive evening-event on 10 October 2012. Organized at the European Parliament, under the auspices of Member of European Parliament (MEP) Norbert Glante, the organizers invited members of relevant European Institutions and regional end-user representatives to join a panel debate on the growing use of GMES services and their impact at regional level in Europe. The panel debate was meant to stimulate a broader debate with the audience.
MEP Glante, in his opening speech recognized the political, economic and social importance of the GMES programme for Europe’s competitiveness and guaranteed the complete support of the European Parliament and his personal commitment to the programme development.
Director of ESA’s Earth Observation Programmes, Volker Liebig, explained the benefits that the future Sentinel satellites can bring to European citizens. He also stressed that the Sentinels are a major improvement compared to existing missions. “The SAR instrument on the two Sentinel-1 satellites, for example, will have 12 times the observation capacity of the ASAR instrument on Envisat,” said Prof. Liebig. “Sentinel-2, with 13 spectral channels and a global coverage every of five days between the two satellites, will provide operational data not available before for many applications.”
Prof. Alan Wells, Vice President of NEREUS, presented the impressive results obtained by the NEREUS-ESA joint publication initiative: “67 case studies of regional uses of GMES; 47 different regions represented; 17 Members States”. The publication, said Prof. Wells, should not be considered just a collection of GMES uses but the reference book for policy makers to understand the social and economic benefits derived from the use of GMES in Europe.
B. Medgyesy, Government Commissioner of the EU Danube strategy, closed the first panel stressing the strategic importance of GMES as part of the EU Strategy for the Danube Region. “The EU Strategy for the Danube Macro-region brings together 14 States of which 8 are EU member States, GMES provides a fundamental help to solve problems in crucial domain areas such as energy and water management and represents a strategic cooperation tool for the actors involved going far behind EU membership”.
Members of the European Parliament V. Prodi and A. Patriciello and representatives of the European Commission R. Schulte-Braucks, Head of the GMES Bureau and L. Dijkstra, Deputy Head of Analyst Unit, DG Regio joined the panel discussion together with end users representatives of the Danube macro region and the Warsaw Metropolitan area taken as model example. T. Slawinski, Deputy Director of the Mazovian Regional Planing Office and P. Pécsely, Director of the Central-Transdanubian Water Authority presented concrete examples of regional GMES applications.
