European survey on the uses of Copernicus

The objective of this action was to collect information from end-users to evaluate their awareness of:

• Copernicus products, their uses or non uses of the products and the reasons of their uses or non uses,
• Copernicus platforms (PEPS, CODE-DE, …), their use or non uses of these platforms and the reasons of their uses or non uses, with an extension to the DIAS when they will be operational
• The way they use Copernicus DATA or the way they would use them (download, etc.)

The idea was that the collection of that information in a homogeneous way over the network of Copernicus Relays enables analysis of Copernicus awareness in Europe, of the reasons of use or non use so as to identify changes that could foster the use of Copernicus products by end-users. In doing so, this action also raised end-users’ awareness of the Copernicus program.

End-users are the users, which use applications (SME, Institutions etc.), the intermediary societies (those, which develop the applications, those, which commercialize the applications, etc.), the platform managers, etc.

The study was carried out by the satellite applications team of Cerema, a French public technical institute.

It started in September 2019 and ended up in December 2020.

It had three phases:

1/ Methodology: construction of the survey strategy and the survey content

2/ Diffusion and communication about the survey towards a large audience

(this phase was impacted by the Covid-19 situation)

3/ Analysis of the results, completed by individual interviews between September and November 2020.

Overall, the study allowed to collect 110 answers - a rather good figure compared to comparable studies performed in the past years of Copernicus - among which 75% from France but also 19% from other European countries and 6% from countries outside the EU.

The profiles of the respondents were relatively diversified, with 48 administrations (national or local level), 24 private companies, 30 persons from University / Academia and 8 associations.

The results of the survey are described in detail in the Action report. The key take-away of this survey is that the data and platforms are used much more than the services. So far, this report is only available in French, but it will be translated in English for a broader diffusion.  A presentation of the survey results has been made to CNES in December 2020, and to the French FPCUP network in April 2021.

The survey experience and the results have been used to feed a survey launched in November 2021 by the French Ministry for Ecological Transition in order to prepare the future of Copernicus program during the French presidency of the EU: “Copernicus: user needs in the horizon of 2035”.