The European Commission plans to rapidly expand its environmental monitoring programme Copernicus. For this purpose, the European Space Agency (ESA) recently pledged 2.55 billion Euros towards contracts to advance the production of six new Copernicus satellite missions.

The Disasters programme unit at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) recently joined a newly launched online platform aimed at placing anticipatory action on the humanitarian agenda.

A knowledge platform for adaptation action on climate change recently updated the information, layout and logo of their website. With this step, adaptationcommunity.net aims to improve the user experience of the online platform and consequently facilitate the access to a wide variety of resources on climate change adaptation action, including tools working with Earth observation data.

A new report outlines the impact of Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL) data on various policy areas.

A new report outlines the economic potential of Earth observation (EO) data for the African continent. The report "Unlocking the potential of Earth observation to address Africa’s critical challenges”, published by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in collaboration with Digital Earth Africa (DE Africa) on January 15, explores the prospective financial impact of DE Africa on the African economy.

A variety of environmental and man-made factors can have a detrimental effect on the yield of farmers worldwide. A programme launched in Kenya, funded by SERVIR in collaboration with NASA Harvest and the Swiss Re Foundation, uses Earth observation (EO) data to assess crop damage and prioritise the mobilisation of financial aid to farmers.

The European Space Agency (ESA) wants to further develop the understanding of our planet. For this purpose, ESA chose three concepts in 2018 to compete for the next Earth Explorer mission. The decision was made last week to move on to the next development stage with Harmony, one of the three concepts.

The world leading insurance and reinsurance provider Swiss Re recently partnered with the commercial synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite operator ICEYE to improve flood modelling and support disaster response efforts around the world.