Creating a permanent National Working Group to coordinate EO based activities in the frame of the Italian Presidency of the Council of Ministers

The National experiences matured so far suggest the need for a more structured interaction and exchange of information between the different Entities called to operate in the field of Earth Observation, which involves not only the main Institution involved vertically on the EO topic, but also all those actors with potential interest such as the Ministry of Agricultural and Forestry Policies, the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport and the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Tourism and the Ministry of the Environment and Protection of the Territory and the Sea, especially in light of the recently approved national regulations where Earth Observation is explicitly mentioned as a valuable approach for added value information complementing traditional monitoring practices.

This is particularly true in view of the current regulations concerning the Prime Minister Decree (20 December 2018), related to the establishment of the Coordination structure for the National space and aerospace policies and the related application services. In this context, the different National legislations are put under the same umbrella having as common denominator the monitoring aspects tied to EO. The mentioned legislation refers to:

• the Prime Ministerial Decree of 20 February 2019, concerning the approval of the National Paper for the mitigation of hydrogeological risk, the restoration and protection of the environmental resource,
• the LAW 28 September 2018, n. 109, containing "Urgent provisions for the city of Genoa, the security of the national infrastructure and transport network, the seismic events of 2016 and 2017, work and other emergencies",
• the agreement signed by the Ministry of Education, University and Research with the presidents of the National research Council of Italy (CNR) and the Italian Space Agency for the use of the constellation Cosmo Sky Med for the monitoring of school buildings., and
• nonetheless, the different EU Directive aimed to environmental monitoring, such as Air Quality Directive, Water Framework Directive, Nitrate Directive, Maritime Spatial Plamming, Marine Strategy Framework Directive, etc..

The proposed activity is aimed to take stock of the various activities of national interest pertaining to Earth observation, and, in particular, to provide the condition where common needs are put under the same common denominator, both in term of economy and technology supply. 

The main objective of this task is to support the creation of a permanent Working Group within and to support the Italian Coordinating structure for space and aerospace policies, in order to drive EO national capacities and coordinate the EO national activities retained strategic, or of interest, by the Italian Government. Also, this action will support the implementation of the National Space Economy development providing the context where the different EO national activities can find synergies in term of common EO based developments.

The collected information will result useful to define the National Position Paper on EO. To structure the Position Paper the following steps have been identified:

• mapping of the EO activities at National and Regional scale;
• identifying of key actors to which interact and to involve into the Working Group on EO;
• analysis of the different process that underpin the development of legislations or activities to which EO would result of support or an added value;
• harmonizing in place processes on the bases of common activities and stress the use of EO to reach, even partial, the foreseen objectives;
• Address future challenge centered as much as possible to EO and the application leveraging as much as possible on European and National EO data, services and information;
• Support the national Space Economy implementation supporting the aggregation of common practices/activities in the frame of EO.

Also, as logistic support to the above targets, the action foresses the development of a dissemination strategy (action plan) and a targeted website to provide widespread information about the Program and to collect contributions from national user communities on Copernicus product uptake to address gap-filling activities.