Supporting eight of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) from the United Nations (UN), the e-shape initiative aims at moving away from a data-driven to a user-focused approach by gathering the knowledge of decades of public investment in the field of Earth Observation (EO) and cloud capabilities. With 32 project pilots spread out into seven thematic areas and keeping onboarding new ones, e-shape strives to provide EO services to decision-makers, citizens, industry and researchers.
e-shape’s seven thematic activities, called showcases, are: agriculture, health, energy, ecosystem, water, disasters and climate. They all address societal challenges, foster entrepreneurship and support sustainable development, in alignment to the three main priorities of GEO (SDGs, Paris Agreement and Sendaï Framework). Their main goal is to strengthen EuroGEO as Europe's contribution to the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), aiming at bringing together Earth Observation resources in Europe. We at DLR-DFD are involved in the showcase related to health.
In the frame of the health showcase, the project pilot 2.3 “EO-based pollution-health risk profiling in the urban environment” aims to improve Air Quality (AQ) and health information in cities. With the galloping urbanization, an increasing part of the population will suffer from adverse health effects for being exposed to air pollution, when only one in ten persons lives in a city meeting the World Health Organization (WHO) AQ criteria.
The objectives of this pilot are: