Sweden

Group on Earth Observations – GEO Week 2022

Statement of Sweden

Sweden would like to express its thanks to the GEO Secretariat and the Government of Ghana for arranging the GEO Week 2022 in Accra. We also welcome the possibility of on-line participation to the GEO Week 2022.

Global Action for Local Impact is required in order to accelerate the implantation of Agenda 2030, the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. In this context, GEO has been contributing and will continue its efforts to improve the availability, access and use of open Earth Observations data.

The development and implementation of the GEO Work Programme 2023-2025 will be instrumental in providing better insights and evidence for policy development and decision making, which is expected to lead to improved local impact over time, not at least when it comes into the field of climate adaptation. Well received objectives of the Work Programme are the greater collaboration and integration of Programme activities, stronger emphasis on open knowledge and more specific identification of outputs and intended actual users.

The European Copernicus Programme has now moved into the 2.0 phase (2021-2027) and together with the new Destination Earth initiative, which aims to develop a very high precision digital model of the Earth to monitor and simulate natural and human activity, Europe will continue to be a big contributor to GEO. Here Sweden and SMHI is heavily involved in CAMS (Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service) and C3S (Copernicus Climate Change Service), but also in CMEMS (Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service) and CEMS (Copernicus Emergency Management Service), and we will also become a contributor to the DestinE Extreme Digital Twin.

In CAMS the National Collaboration Programme is a new module, which will enhance the uptake of CAMS products at national level, by co-designing joint activities between CAMS and each Member State, and many of the other Copernicus services will here follow the same path as CAMS. In addition, some of the Copernicus services will also develop new knowledge hubs, as specific thematic hubs on Health (CAMS), Coastal zone (CMEMS), Artic (CMEMS) and Energy (C3S).

The Swedish Space Data Lab, coordinated by Swedish Space Agency, will promote innovation, method development and the use of AI with Earth Observation data.

The platform that is the Collaborative Ground Segment for Copernicus in Sweden is further developed to Digital Earth Sweden, to further enhance the Swedish capacity of processing and analyzing earth observation data.

Using Earth Observations big data and AI, KTH Royal Institute of Technology has developed innovative methods and applications to support sustainable and resilient urban planning, and early detection and near real-time monitoring of wildfires. The EO-based wildfire applications developed by the KTH team can be used by fire-fighting authorities for effective emergency management and decision support during and after wildfires.

The EO&AI-based method developed by KTH produced high-quality urban mapping and change detection results for 60 cities around the globe. Using EO-derived urban data in the EO4SDG11 Toolkit, KTH developed a Google Earth Engine app for automatic city definition and calculation of SDG 11.3.1 “Land Use Efficiency” core and secondary indicators for any city in the world.

The SDG11.3.1 Land Use Efficiency app is nominated for the GEO SDG 2022 award.