The EU executive is expected to publish new guidelines in the coming weeks to improve satellite monitoring of the Earth's climate.
With rising temperatures, ice melting at the poles and seas threatening to submerge islands, keeping a close eye on the planet is increasingly seen as paramount.
Satellites can play a crucial role in this field. The European Commission is exploiting their potential through a programme called GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security), a project for earth observation designed to forecast environmental threats. It represents the second most important EU initiative in space policy after Galileo.
The EU document outlining future actions for GMES follows a draft regulation laying down the details of its operations up until 2013, which the Commission put forward last April.
But the main challenge remains satellite navigation. Europeans are still waiting for Galileo, the EU's alternative to the USA's leading Global Positioning System (GPS) and Russia's GLONASS. While Europeans were still fighting over the details of Galileo, China also began to develop an alternative system, which goes further than Europe's, according to many experts.
Contrary to its American and Russian counterparts, which are both financed and controlled by the army, Galileo has been designed specifically for civilian and commercial purposes.
This is expected to give it an edge, but no commercially-available applications are expected within the next five years (see 'Background').
EGNOS, precursor of Galileo
In the meantime, at the beginning of October the Commission launched what has been labelled the precursor of Galileo, EGNOS (the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service).
EGNOS improves the accuracy of satellite navigation signals in Europe. "If today thanks to GPS we can localise a car in a street, tomorrow with Galileo (and EGNOS) we will be able to see which garage it is parked in," Diego Canga Fano, one of the EU Transport Commissioner Antonio Tajani's closest advisors, said on Thursday (15 October) at a conference dedicated to EU space policy.
At the moment, EGNOS will be used in Europe by GPS subscribers, and tomorrow it will be an extra feature for Galileo-enabled applications, according to the Commission's plans.
"What we are doing opens the door for European businesses and citizens to benefit from the myriad of better applications and new opportunities made possible by more precise navigation signals. We are laying the foundation stone of a very imminent future," said Tajani at the launch of EGNOS.
