Civil Security from Space

CIVIL SECURITY AND CRISIS RESPONSE ENABLED BY SPACE ASSETS

In 2022, ESA created the Civil Security from Space (CSS) programme – a multi-disciplinary effort to propel the integration of Europe’s space competencies and assets into monitoring, mitigating and resolving civil security and crisis events.

The programme is running around 14 groundbreaking activities, with participation from more than 40 partners across European industry and user organisations. Together, these partners are working to advance and foster the use of innovative space-based solutions to help public safety and disaster relief agencies to act swiftly in critical incidents, natural disasters, law enforcement, and humanitarian crises – thereby saving lives and livelihoods, and protecting European communities and economies.

The CSS programme has offered European industry the opportunity to capture new and emerging markets in the use of space to address the challenges of civil security and crisis management, while also boosting user awareness and involvement in the development and uptake of new solutions – paving the way for a bigger, more ambitious programme that will take these solutions to scale.

Objectives

Addressing the needs of civil security and crisis management requires end-to-end solutions that rely on the following:

• Sensors across ground, air, sea, and space that collect and transmit data for situational awareness and impact assessment.
• Processing capabilities that exploit and analyse the vast amounts of data available, to extract value-added and actionable information for users.
• communications infrastructure that enables coordination of personnel and resources, and distributes data and intelligence to the right recipients in a swift, secure, and resilient manner.

The CSS programme offers a framework for the development of such solutions through supported activities with the following key features:

• Responsive: enabling autonomous and proactive response to civil security and crisis events – triggering early, rapid, and more effective action.
• Smart: fostering the use of multiple systems with embedded intelligence, all collectively contributing to the collection, distribution, transformation and delivery of data in a tailored and user-friendly way.
• Interoperable: ensuring the transparent integration of multiple space and non-space solutions, fostering interoperability of an extended set of civil security and crisis management applications.
• Secure: providing a solution that is resilient by design, trusted and secure, thus ensuring critical functions and operations in all situations.
• Scalable: future proofing systems through a modular, scalable approach that allows for capabilities growth with the adoption of new technologies, and new contributing systems, applications and services, allowing also for the implementation of new operational and collaboration models.

Stakeholder engagement 

Beyond the opportunities in technology developments, ESA is aiming to foster the engagement of civil security and crisis management user communities across Europe and beyond, ensuring that their needs and priorities are addressed through ESA activities, and building their demand for solutions that can be offered by European industry and systems.

In addition, ESA recognises the need to address the fragmentation of diverse solutions, and it will increasingly support efforts to enable harmonisation and interoperability, and thus the ability for European industry to offer their solutions widely across different customers and systems.

How to engage in ESA's crisis, resilience, and civil security efforts

The CSS programme is no longer accepting proposals for projects through its Open Call, as all funds have now been committed.

ESA remains open to collaboration with end-users, industry, governments, and international entities on this important topic. If you would like to stay informed, you can register your interest in our partners group form, or contact resilience@esa.int.