ENERGEO · Earth Observation for monitoring and assessment of the environmental impact of energy use

The main objective of the EnerGEO project is to develop a strategy for a global assessment of the current and future impact of the exploitation of energy resources on the environment and ecosystems and to demonstrate this strategy for a variety of energy resources worldwide. The global observation strategy will be developed to appropriately assess the impacts of current and future transitions in energy-use on the environment by a combination of: • models already available for the different sources of energ: TASES, REMIX and MESSAGE • existing global datasets from which environmental indicators will be derived to quantify changes to freshwater systems, biosphere, ecosystems, atmosphere and oceans. • existing and currently developed models capable of assessing and forecasting environmental impacts and costs of energy exploitation. By developing a distributed system based on the recommendations of the GEO-Architecture and Data Committee global collection and dissemination of data relating to the effect of energy use on the environment will be supported. By including members of the Energy-Community of Practice of GEO, sustained contribution of the GEO-tasks EN-07-02 and EN-07-3 will be realised. The project takes the testing and demonstration of the observing system and developed scenarios through the execution of dedicated pilots at heart. The pilots are focused on the most important issues relating to atmospheric composition and land degradation through the use of fossil fuels, future impacts of the use and production of biomass on land ecosystems and food security, sustainable integration of solar energy in current grids as well as its visual impact and relating to the impact of wind energy on marine ecosystems. Attention will be given to pollutants that are continuously cycling between the atmosphere and aquatic ecosystems. The results of the pilots feed into an integrated platform that will be run for known scenarios in order to assess energy strategies.