The climate is changing faster than planned, emergencies and crisis are in the news everyday. In parallel, population is growing, exchanges are across the world, the economy needs to develop. In this context, we need to keep the balance to protect our planet as a resource and a patrimony. Sustainable development and green transition is at the heart of this nexus. And The Green Deal is the Commission action plan in this long term endeavour.

With Copernicus, we have been collectively visionary decades ago through its public services to monitor the planet and support green economic development. However, we need to go beyond as the situation is evolving, because policies need to be science and evidence based more and more and we need to act quickly. Therefore we have the opportunity to benefit for transformative changes within the context of the dual digital and green transition.

Destination Earth (DestinE) is a Commission flagship initiative aiming to develop gradually over the next 10 years, a highly accurate digital model of the Earth (a digital twin of the Earth) to monitor, simulate and predict natural and human activity, and to develop and test scenarios for more sustainable development and for achieving both the green (Green Deal) and digital (Digital Strategy) priorities of the EU.

Leveraging on EU’s substantial investments and activities in high-performance computing (HPC), Artificial Intelligence (AI), cloud computing, high-speed connectivity networks, data from multiple sources (space, in-situ, socio-economic data) and by bringing together European scientific and industrial excellence to achieve the objectives of the initiative. DestinationEarth will be as well a new way to interact with users and consider individual usages through user-defined scenarios-building including impact sectors, and considering new forms of cooperation and co-design for best practices.

DestinationEarth has to be understood first as an operational and trustable portfolio of digital services, applications and tools to create content, to support decision-making including in extreme situations, anticipate environmental disasters and resultant socio-economic crises to save lives and avoid large economic downturns.

The presentation will illustrate these concepts and how DestinE will build on the capacities provided among others by a digital Copernicus and act in synergy. The implementation of the two programmes will benefit from powerful synergies while at the same time, both initiatives will maintain their focus on their respective, distinct, scope of work and related activities.

The rapid growth of Earth Observation (EO) data, especially in the last decade, combined with the ever-increasing development of analytical theories and tools, has generated a wide range of practical applications covering land, maritime, climate change and atmospheric monitoring. The comprehensive and systematic structuring and processing of this data and their transition to valuable knowledge has helped us model and predict natural processes, improve Atmospheric, Marine and Land monitoring as well as understand the complex dynamics of our planet’s environment.
Current EU data services and repositories offer EO data of staggering volume and diversity. However, data access and use are yet to fully spread beyond EO experts and scientists to the wider industry. EO data services contribute to the European Green Deal data space, facilitating data flows inside the EU and across sectors, for the common good. European programs like Copernicus, Galileo, EGNOS and INSPIRE already provide a significant amount of invaluable EO data that is currently being used by many organizations and SMEs to deliver their value-added services.
In this presentation, we will be discussing some existing projects and initiatives offering cloud infrastructures for processing Copernicus data and information like DIAS (Data and Information Access Services) and the ECMWF and EUMETSAT European Weather Cloud infrastructure for processing meteorological and satellite data close to their physical location. DestinE, the new EC coordinated initiative implemented by ESA, ECMWF and EUMETSAT will be utilising diverse HPC and Cloud infrastructures and distributed cloud-based storage infrastructures to provide access and tools for processing EO data., Finally, we will be discussing some related EC Research and Innovation Action (RIA) projects like AI4EU, AI4Copernicus and eo4eu. Their key objectives are to provide the means and tools for implementing technologies based on AI/ML, AR/VR and semantic-enhanced knowledge graphs augmenting the FAIRness of EO data and support a sophisticated representation of data entities and their dynamics.

We will talk about ESA and its plans in EO, why space EO is a key to European space economy growth and to understand and tackle climate changes. Transformative technologies that we explore and develop at the ESA ɸ-lab@ESRIN, such as Artificial Intelligence, Could and Edge computing, are instrumental to this and transforming the way we’ll use EO.

Based on CloudFerro experience from developing and operating DIAS and DIAS-like platforms, we will discuss the challenges, implemented technology solutions and future trends regarding Copernicus platforms. It will cover such important topics like:
- federation of data, resources and users
- renewable energy for processing
- cloud computing vs HPC for big EO processing
- expansion from EO data to all spatial information
- semantic layers supplementing data
- optimization of storage, computing and network consumption in federated environment

In the current Big Data and EO architectures which are utilising various EO and non-EO data sources, as well as machine learning and Artificial Intelligence tools, there is an emerging need to establish “trust” mechanisms by ensuring end-to-end data and software traceability, auditability and provenance chain. Moreover, the “EU Ethics Guidelines for Trustworthy AI”, which is a part of EU AI strategy, requires the transparency and explainability of elements relevant to the AI-driven systems: the data, the system and the processing models, as well as that the decisions made by an AI systems can be understood and traced by human beings. As such, for AI to be “trustworthy”, state the Guidelines, we must be able to understand why it behaved a certain way and why it provided a given interpretation. Today, this is still an open challenge thus a whole field of research, called Explainable AI (XAI) tries to address this issue to better understand the system’s underlying mechanisms and find solutions.
What are the implications of these requirements for EO and Copernicus data and applications? Do we need to develop new tools that can ensure the provenance of the datasets (origin and history of modifications) as well as systems for tracking of the AL/ML model training processes?

This presentation will focus on the EO data provenance which is a new concept that allows to track the EO data along the digital supply chain and capable to provide in the end-to-end traceability of data, software tools and models. In particular, the EOGuard project will be presented to showcase the use of KSI blockchain technology for verification of the “authenticity, integrity and time” of EO data products and their traceability throughout different cloud infrastructures, including results of the “proof of concept” implementation on the Copernicus DIAS cloud for the Common Agriculture Policy use cases. The question of how a similar technology can be used for auditing and certification of AI driven EO applications will also be discussed.