My Sustainable Forest selected to share its story at a European Commission workshop
My Sustainable Forest project participated last October 8th in the event organised by the European Commission “Paving the way for HorizonEurope in the Earth Observation (EO) downstream sector: Fostering a competitive and sustainable European EO downstream workshop”.
Invited by the project officer Iulia Simon, from the Research Executive Agency of the European Commission, My Sustainable Project was selected as an example of innovative project and a testimonial of novel space-based solutions applied to forest management. With the representation of the project coordinator GMV and partners such as Madera Plus, My Sustainable Forest participated in the session where opportunities and barriers to the market penetration of EO-based solutions were discussed.
The question of the roadmap for turning research and development projects into marketable services was therefore debated, through the lessons learned by different EO downstream projects funded by the H2020 programme such as My Sustainable Forest together with other similar initiatives linked to agriculture, urban management, air quality and coastal management.
In addition to presentations of the different H2020 projects and sharing the lessons learned from each research consortium, the event featured more sessions that addressed other topics such as the current regulatory framework and the commercial exploitation of space-based solutions. This session was aimed to make recommendations to European and national policy makers to ensure market adoption of space-based solutions through an updated regulatory framework in various fields such as environment, agriculture or forest management, in the case of the My Sustainable’s Forest testimonial.
The event concluded with a debate on the importance of Earth Observation data for the economic sector in the European Union and the next steps to be taken in the new Horizon 2020 programme.