How observing the Earth from space supports our quest to tackle climate change

Abstract

Climate change represents the biggest global threat of the 21st century. This has been widely recognized and is currently responded to by major international initiatives, summarizing the most pressing, globally relevant requirements in addressing the effects of a changing climate, such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Paris Agreement, the UN’s “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030. The European Space Agency (ESA) is already addressing a large number of the requirements that respond to the above main drivers for climate action through being a main developer of European Earth Observation (EO) capabilities to deliver climate science and services. ESA’s satellites provide the global view, enabling the science community to detect signs of change, identify significant trends and constrain the models to predict the future. Through its role as a major provider of systematic and global climate observations ESA interacts with a number of international organisations, stakeholders and users, within the climate landscape that are working toward strengthening the scientific understanding and projection of climate and addressing the consequences of future change. One of the keystones of ESA’s climate activities is the Climate Change Initiative (CCI), which has been running for more than 10 years and is led by the ESA Climate Office. This unique scientific effort involves ca. 450 world-leading experts across ESA Member States to generate global multi-mission and multi-decadal datasets satisfying the requirements for 22 Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) defined by the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS), on behalf of UNFCCC. These datasets have fully characterised uncertainties and are validated using independent, traceable, in-situ measurements. They provide an impartial yardstick to understand climate processes and to improve and validate climate models, thereby enhancing the quality, credibility and exploitation of model predictions. In association with Earth System Models (ESMs), CCI data also provide the observational record to study drivers, interactions and feedbacks due to climate change, as well as reservoirs, teleconnections, tipping points, global energy, water and carbon budgets and other Earth-system cycles, etc. The scientific results of the CCI programme, published in more than 900 papers to date, are a major contribution to the physical science base of IPCC Assessment Reports. The keynote will provide an assessment on the challenges and opportunities that space-borne data provide in our quest to tackle climate change, and will focus on the current and future satellite missions developed by ESA, underlying data storage and processing systems and how users will be able to integrate such data into potential scientific and commercial applications.