Water is increasingly recognized as the most relevant resource of the 21th century, and UN Water recommends in sustainable water investments to prevent future conflicts. Significant social and economical impacts are associated with changes of water quality in inland waters. It is almost impossible to think, in the 21st Century, that water industries and governments would produce sustainable economic and ecological development plans on water without reasonable information on hand. Accordingly, an increasing demand from water industries, including aquaculture, water construction or dam operators, insurers, development banks and water agencies on actual or long-term historic water related information is observed. The eoFRESH service responds to the increasing demand with an independent multi-satellite based monitoring solution, as only traditional in-situ methodologies are capable neither to retrieve historic information, nor to provide actual harmonized information for a huge number of inland waters. eoFRESH combines the monitoring capabilities of an increasing number of historic, actual and future satellite missions, allowing nowadays up to daily global observations and going back in time for 30 years for millions of water bodies and rivers globally. eoFRESH starts with the provision of relevant globally harmonized water quality measures (e.g. turbidity and related suspended matter, phytoplankton concentration). The service is characterised by three key features: Independency with globally harmonized and valid and consistent measures, extremely cost-efficiency through fully automated production on free accessible satellite missions, extremely easy information uptake through access from web-services and applications. Within the Phase 1 feasibility study it is the core intention to summarize all the necessary information, including technical and economic aspects which are relevant to provide a sound roadmap to bring the eoFRESH service to the market.

Hydropower as the world’s largest source of renewable energy still has a high unused potential to be explored in times of a changing global energy policy. The economic and ecological evaluation of new hydropower developments rely on a number of environmental conditions, such as key hydrological parameters. For example, the major drivers of the reservoir storage capacity over time, reservoir life time, and also a major driver of the operations costs are directly related to the sediment regime and sediment trapping. HYPOS is catalyzing innovation with an operational service for appropriate environmental and economic investment planning and monitoring based on Earth Observation (EO) technologies and modelling for the Hydropower industry. The to developed online accessible Decision Support Tool will provide essential assets for hydro power managers, planners and decision makers in their work. The subscription portal brings together high-quality satellite based measurements for historic time periods, actual current monitoring, up-to-date modelled hydrological parameters, with nowcasting on various orderable levels of detail and available in-situ data for integrated baseline and environmental impact assessments. The service significantly contributes on a trans-national as well as a global scale, with the requirement of independent, standardized and consistent information over a wide range of different water bodies and spatial scales. Substantial Blue Footprint analysis are enabled based on sophisticated and state-of-the-art algorithms and methodology featuring sustainable long-term monitoring solutions.

Coastal zones are critical regions, accommodating a significant proportion of the global population and hosting diverse ecosystems that provide essential services. Coastal “Blue carbon” ecosystems, such as mangroves, seagrasses, and salt marshes, play a crucial role in carbon sequestration and storage, biodiversity and coastal protection. Despite their socio-economic and biological importance, they face numerous threats from human activities and climate change, necessitating their conservation and management. Mapping, modelling and monitoring coastal zones using Earth Observation (EO) data is essential for this task. It needs to consider the complex coastal dynamics, past and future change scenarios, and the interaction between Blue Carbon and the coastal zone dynamics. By integrating EO data, advanced modelling techniques, and detailed process-based morphodynamic models, COASTS aims to develop a downstream service for coastal observation, with a focus on Blue Carbon. This service, utilizing Copernicus Marine and other initiatives, will provide govern. stakeholders and coastal planning with relevant information for developing coastal management strategies, including the assessment of blue carbon habitats and their environmental services. Further, COASTS will develop innovative methods and comprehensive analyses to create new business models related to emergent blue carbon markets and will offer new international income sources for countries with blue carbon ecosystem presence. COASTS will initially focus on pilot sites in Germany, Jersey, and the Maldives where govern. customers have a demand and support the project. The learnings from these examples will form a blueprint for broader application in other regions in response to a growing global need. Supported by an interdisciplinary team and strong links with governmental institutions, the COASTS project presents an innovative, scaleable and sustainable approach to coastal conservation and blue carbon management.

Key principles of the Green Deal are to prioritise energy efficiency, develop a power sector based largely on renewable resources, to secure an affordable EU energy supply and to have a fully integrated, interconnected digitalised EU energy market. However, renewable energy scale up in Europe faces increasing resistance due to limitations in applicable land area and the willingness of local communities to have wind or solar parks close by. One possibility to resolve this issue is the usage of offshore space. Blue renewable energy sources such as offshore (floating) wind, floating solar (FPV), waves, tides and currents have a high and still unused potential to be explored. This is of particular importance in view of the current energy crisis and changing energy policy. For all offshore technologies, lengthy and expensive MetOcean, geophysical and environmental campaigns are needed, which slow down the upscaling of offshore renewables. The proposed Blue Energy Offshore Installation Accelerator (BLUE-X) will contribute to the Green Deal objectives and its related policies, in particular with regard to increasing the EU’s climate ambition for 2030 and 2050, supplying clean, affordable and secure energy, mitigating natural hazards and preserving and restoring ecosystems and biodiversity. BLUE-X is an innovative Copernicus based solution for optimising and accelerating decision making for blue renewable energy projects in all phases, from planning to construction, operation and decommissioning. The heart of this solution is a cloud-based IT network of relevant Earth observation and MetOcean data streams that are combined in decision support tools for each phase. As a result, the planning and construction phase can be significantly optimised, thereby reducing costs, and required time to full operation. BLUE-X will be available and showcased for all key offshore energy domains for some of the most important European offshore projects to date but can be applied anywhere.