The European Commission proposed a Regulation on a monitoring framework for resilient European forests in November 2023. It builds on Copernicus as well as existing national data and shall offer better information for decision making and policy implementation across Member States. The intended monitoring system will be comprehensive and reduce existing knowledge gaps through scattered, incomplete, and outdated data on EU forests. Besides the collection of better data for decision making and policy implementation, the proposed law will create business opportunities not only for the growing Copernicus and EO monitoring industry but also to forest owners for marketing their ecosystem services, such as carbon removals. FUTUREFOR addresses key challenges deriving from the proposed law aiming at providing accurate and timely forest data for Europe. The project will closely liaise with Copernicus Entrusted Entities and key national stakeholders to assess the deriving needs from the Regulation together. The project will also support Ukraine adopting EU forest legislation, on its way becoming an EU member in the future. Based on our experiences in forest monitoring, Copernicus, AI and big data analysis the FUTUREFOR project will carry out research and innovation to establish the needed knowledge and propose products and workflows to explore the feasibility and limitations of innovative new and improved existing Copernicus-based datasets. The project will build on operational services that members of the consortium already provide and experiences from earlier H2020 and Horizon European projects. FUTUREFOR will also investigate innovative aerial platforms collecting sensor and image data from the stratosphere. Finally, three commercial business applications will be developed to demonstrate the business opportunities evolving from open Copernicus- and complementing forest data.

The smooth functioning of the European economy and the welfare of its citizens depends upon an ever-growing set of services and facilities that are reliant on space and ground based infrastructure. Examples include communications (radio, TV, mobile phones), navigation of aircraft and private transport via GPS, and service industries (e.g. banking). These services, however, can be adversely affected by the space weather hazards. The forecasting of space weather hazards, driven by the dynamical processes originating on the sun, is critical to the mitigation of their negative effects. This proposal brings world leading groups in the fields of space physics and systems science in order to develop an accurate and reliable forecast system for space weather. It combines their individual strengths to significantly improve the current modelling capabilities within Europe and to produce a set of forecast tools to accurately predict the occurrence and severity of space weather events. Within project PROGRESS we will develop an European tool to forecast the solar wind parameters just upstream of the Earth's magnetosphere. We will develop a comprehensive set of forecasting tools for geomagnetic indices. We will combine the most accurate data based forecast of electron fluxes at GEO with the most comprehensive physics based model of the radiation belts currently available to deliver a reliable forecast of radiation environment in the radiation belts. This project will deliver these individual forecast tools together with a unified tool that combines the forecasting tools with the prediction of the solar wind parameters at L1 to substantially increase the lead-time of space weather forecasts.