The European Space Agency (ESA) is offering support to companies to assess the viability of commercial space-based services in response to climate change to meet the demands of particular user communities.
ESA Business Applications is running a Kick-start competition aimed at identifying ideas for new types of Commercial Climate Services. Relevant opportunities include for instance assessing the impact of regulations at local and regional level and the monitoring of these regulations. In other cases, climate change may open up new business areas in order to mitigate or even exploit rising temperatures and environmental change in sectors such as Health, Energy Supply, Transportation and Critical Infrastructure, the management of Food and Water Resources, and Compliance Monitoring. Ideas from other application areas that fit the scope of the call may also be proposed. Ideas must utilise at least one type of space asset such as Earth Observation, Satellite Navigation or Satellite Communications.
The competition is open from 24 November 2017 until 16 January 2018.
Kick-start activities are aimed at fostering innovation and reaching out to new players, particularly SMEs. Kick-start activities have a fixed budget envelope of 80k€ (60k€ ESA and 20k€ Industry funding). Calls for Kick-start activities are related to particular themes, and elaborate the business opportunity and the technical viability of new applications and services. Successful Kick-start activities may be further developed into commercially viable businesses with follow-up support from ESA Business Applications in the form of a Demonstration Project.