The application of today's and tomorrow's space technologies for the support of environmental risk management has huge development potential. Introduction Since 1987, the Council of Europe has been administering an intergovernmental agreement concerning the management of natural and technological hazards, known as the 'EUR-OPA Major Hazards Agreement'. This Open Partial Agreement on the prevention of, protection against, and organisation of relief in the event of major natural and technological disasters was adopted on 20 March 1987 by the Council's Committee of Ministers. A Coordinating Group set up under the terms of the Agreement is charged with conducting a multidisciplinary study of the scope for cooperation in coping with natural and technological disasters, including the organisation of relief, training and research based on a network of specialised centres. Back in 1994, these signatories requested that a study be made of the potential of space technologies for improving hazard prevention and emergency assistance, and ESA was asked in May that year to provide technical support to this study.
Space technologies complement existing ground-based and airborne equipment.
To be easily exploitable, satellite systems must not require significant changes in the existing decision- making channels specific to each country. These preliminary conclusions were sufficiently encouraging for ESA to propose to continue the study and to extend it to cover other types of risks and to set up a number of demonstration projects. A Resolution to this effect was presented to the ministerial meeting on the EUR-OPA Agreement on Major Hazards held in Brussels on 6 October 1994 and was unanimously adopted. With this Resolution, 'the Ministers request, in view of the importance which they attach to the potential contributions of space technology for major risk management, the continuation of the prospective study undertaken on the use of space technology for the purpose of risk management, concerning monitoring, navigation, telecommunications as well as data collection and transmission'. The second phase was aimed at complementing the inventory of relevant satellite resources available or planned within 'greater Europe' and was under-taken as an internal ESA activity.