Slide from Josef Aschbacher, Director General of ESA, presentation at LPS25
As we highlighted in our previous blog, I am in Austria this week at the European Space Agency’s Living Planet Symposium (LPS) 2025 with the theme Transitioning from Observing the Earth to Climate Action.
To try and limit my carbon footprint, alongside attempting to savour the journey, I came to Vienna by train. So, on Saturday morning, I boarded the Eurostar to Paris. I had a few hours in Paris, but with the heat I opted for a couple of short walks and lots of drinks rather than my original, more extensive walking plan. From Paris I went to Stuttgart where I stayed overnight, before completing the final leg to Vienna on Sunday. Everything went to plan, the long-distance trains were comfortable and had air-conditioning, plus power sockets to allow me to work.
I arrived in time to support Jerome, who was running a tutorial on Discrete Global Grid Systems (DGGS) and the Free & Open-Source Software Discrete Global Grid Abstraction Library (DGGAL) that was focused on implementing Web APIs based on OGC API – DGGS Standard. We had a good turnover of around 20 people and an interesting iterative discussion. If you’re want to see what we went through, there’s a Jupyter Notebook tutorial on the DGGAL page.
Living Planet Symposium 2025 Day One
I began the formal Symposium on Monday with the plenary session, which began with a video presentation from Alexander Van der Bellen, President of Austria, and Margit Mischkulnig, Head of the Department for Space affairs and Aeronautical Technologies from the Austrian Federal Ministry for Innovation. The latter highlighted practical examples of where Earth Observation (EO) data was being used in Vienna, including monitoring buildings for subsidence near two newly constructed metro lines, and detecting the hottest bus & tram stops to enable cooling actions to be implemented. This second activity makes sense not only for Vienna, but also for many other urban areas now affected by increased air temperatures, and subsidence is closely monitored in London for similar reasons.
Josef Aschbacher, Director General of ESA, highlighted the importance of ESA to ESA, with it accounting for more than 30% of ESA’s 7.7 billion Euro budget – the photo is of a slide he presented highlighting several other ESA facts & figures, including the fact that that ESA signs a contract every hour.
There were also presentations by European partners, and the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) who made a very important point that there is still a data divide in EO. Many people and/or organisations still don’t have access to the data they need, even those that can access data they can’t easily convert it into fast actionable information.
After lunch was the TRUTHS Agora, where the mission was presented to attendees. TRUTHS aims to be a calibration source in space, supporting the calibration of other satellite missions in collaboration with on-ground infrastructure. Telespazio UK were announced as the lead for the Ground Segment. Our new TRUTHS case-study project, which focuses on oceanographic tipping points and reducing uncertainties in ocean colour data, was mentioned in the session. It is also linked to AEROSTATS mentioned below.
Day Two
For me, Tuesday morning was the Space for Climate Observatory (SCO) Initiative session. It began with a presentation from Frederic Bretar, Head of SCO and a member of CNES, on the aspirations and history of SCO.
A round table followed with some fascinating comments from Dorian Droll, a researcher on space history, where he highlighted that the first civilian satellite (Landsat 1) was launched in 1972, and the first ESA EO conference took place in 1978. However, despite the long time we’ve had data, translating EO into better decisions has remained difficult. He highlighted that there is often an assumption one flows directly into the other, but in practice, there is lots of hard work for this translation to occur, with a need for interpretation and evaluation and that is often where politics gets involved as it’s not always in someone’s interest to adopt EO, depending on what it has revealed, or might reveal in the future.
We then had a series of pitch presentations from SCO projects, where I was delighted to have the opportunity present our SwedCoast-BlueCarb project and had several great chats with people afterwards.
It was also interesting to hear about the other SCO projects, who they were collaborating with and how successful they’d had been in getting the benefactors to take up the projects. For our project, I see the conversations and linkages it has generated as the key success to date, although we still developing the technology and the project itself runs until the end of the year.
At the end of the session, the Kenyan Space Agency signed up to become the 30th country to be a member of the SCO.
In the afternoon, I will be switching to a Tipping Points session, where the ARIA-funded AEROSTATS project to be presented by Christine Gommenginger from the National Oceanography Centre. AEROSTATS also aims to support better decision-making by providing information in challenging locations to measure.
Still To Come …
Only the start of the week, and so lots more, will still occur over the next three days. For me, personally, it will involve:
- Oral presentation on our “SwedCoast-BlueCarb project: mapping eelgrass extent and health” on Wednesday afternoon.
- Panellist at an Early Career Scientist event on Thursday morning.
- Chairing a session on New Space Missions Data Quality & Cal/Val Friday morning and poster “Consistency of hyperspectral time-series datasets, showcased through New Space and Third-Party Missions
Looking forward to meeting people and discussing EO with everyone for the rest of the week.
