The European Space Agency and its Member States are working together to ensure that Europe fully realises its space ambitions and tackles pressing challenges in the industry.
Europe faces unprecedented societal, economic and security challenges. Space has enormous untapped potential to help tackle these challenges and future crises while simultaneously creating jobs and boosting innovation in the European space industry.
ESA is further upgrading space-enabled capabilities, particularly for reliable forecasting and rapid responses to crises on Earth, which will help save lives and livelihoods.
The European space policy: Creating a political framework for space
The European Space Agency and its Member States created a common political framework for space activities in Europe.
This approach is intended to equip Europe for space study and exploration, prepare it for new challenges and bring a new dimension to the EU’s external relations.
It sets out a basic vision and strategy for the space sector and tackles issues such as security and defence and access to space and exploration.
The role of space in combatting climate change
Climate change is producing more frequent and intense heatwaves across Europe, as well as heavy rain and flooding that threaten human lives and prosperity.
Space already enables European governments and emergency services to respond to natural disasters by providing timely and accurate images of flooded areas, for example, as well as supplying the precise geolocation of incidents and empowering the emergency response by connecting first responders to their control centres.
Space helps people not only monitor, understand, model, and predict but – crucially – act on climate-induced and other crises.
Further upgrading Europe’s space capabilities, particularly for reliable forecasting and rapid responses to crises on Earth, will help save lives and livelihoods.
Current ESA projects
The European Space Agency is currently undertaking several projects to enhance space technology, combat climate change and explore the dark Universe. They include:
- Copernicus: Copernicus provides accurate, timely and easily accessible information to improve the management of the environment, understand and mitigate the effects of climate change and ensure civil security.
- Biomass: The Biomass mission is designed to deliver crucial information about the state of our forests and how they are changing and to further our knowledge of the role forests play in the carbon cycle.
- Sentinel: The Sentinel missions carry a range of technologies, such as radar and multi-spectral imaging instruments for land, ocean and atmospheric monitoring, to address the operational needs of Copernicus.
- Euclid: Euclid explores how the Universe has expanded and how structure has formed over cosmic history, revealing more about the role of gravity and the nature of dark energy and dark matter.
- Juice: The Juice mission explores Jupiter’s moons as both planetary objects and possible habitats, explores Jupiter’s complex environment in-depth, and studies the wider Jupiter system as an archetype for gas giants across the Universe.
2025 and beyond
Working with the ESA Member States, the ESA defined Agenda 2025, which, for the next four years, puts the ESA and space on track in order to be among the top space agencies in the world.
Its priorities include:
- Strengthen ESA-EU relations
- Contributing to greener economic recovery
- Serving security for citizens
- Addressing challenges and developing technology to combat this
