ESA, NASA join forces to combat climate change
Paris, Jul 13 (EFE).- The European Space Agency and NASA on Tuesday agreed to join forces to understand and address climate change with ground-based imaging, applications and research.
“This agreement will set the standard for future international collaboration, providing the information that is so essential for tackling the challenges posed by climate change and helping to answer and address the most pressing questions in Earth science for the benefit of the United States, Europe, and the world,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a joint statement.
“Both ESA and NASA have excellent tools and the expertise to advance Earth science, so working together we will be able to achieve much more,” ESA’s Acting Director of Earth Observation Programmes, Toni Tolker-Nielsen, said.
The partnership – formalized Tuesday after Nelson and ESA’s Director General, Josef Aschbacher, signed a Statement of Intent – aims to “pave the way to leading a global response to climate change, through the monitoring of the Earth and its environment with their combined efforts in Earth science observations, research, and applications.”
This is not the first time the institutions have worked together. ESA and NASA are currently studying a new gravity mission to shed light on essential Earth system processes, such as the water cycle, to understand the distribution and transport of water masses.
The new partnership will coordinate activities and ways to collaborate on issues of strategic interest at scientific and policy levels by identifying how together they can work more efficiently and quickly.
“Without doubt, space is the best vantage point to measure and monitor climate change, but joining forces is also key to tackling this global issue. This is why today’s agreement between our organisations is so crucial,” Aschbacher said.
The agreement comes ahead of the COP26 climate summit, which will take place at the end of the year, to integrate space into the solution on climate change mitigation. EFE
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