Earth Observation for Compliance Assurance

Compliance Assurance (CA) refers to the process and mechanisms designed to ensure adherence to EU laws, regulations, and policies by individuals, organizations, and Member States (MS).

Compliance Assurance comprises three components:

• Compliance Promotion: Focuses on raising awareness, educating stakeholders, offering technical assistance, and engaging in consultations to promote understanding and voluntary compliance.
• Compliance Monitoring: Involves data collection, inspections, audits, risk assessment, and reporting to ensure adherence to EU rules and to identify areas of concern.
• Compliance Enforcement: Comprises various measures such as infringement procedures, financial penalties, safeguards, sanctions, cooperative dialogue, and action plans to rectify non-compliance. 

The three components of Compliance Assurance work in concert to ensure the effective implementation t of EU laws, safeguarding the integrity of the EU's single market and citizens’ rights.

Earth Observation (EO) can play a crucial role in all components of CA by offering a comprehensive and objective view of our planet and how it changes.

• EO supports promotion by providing free-and-open data, fostering awareness and transparency, and educating stakeholders about the environmental impact of their activities through visual insights.
• With its extensive coverage, EO enables broad-scale surveillance for detecting non-compliance. EO allows continuous monitoring of specific indicators to measure compliance with targets, ensuring prompt detection of any deviations.
• In case of emergencies or sudden events, EO provides a rapid response, allowing authorities to react quickly and providing essential evidence for legal interventions and enforcement. It is particularly useful in environmental risk and impact assessment, and advantageous for monitoring activities across national borders, facilitating coordinated enforcement of regulations across different countries.

Compliance assurance spans various EU policy domains that rely on regulatory frameworks and directives. While few legislative acts are solely dedicated to CA, CA is an indispensable component of most regulations and directives on resource use, where EO may significantly contribute.  Examples of policy areas where EO data is used for compliance include:

• Agriculture: The Common Agricultural Policy historically relies on EO to verify area-based aid, constituting nearly 80 % of EU funding dedicated to agriculture and rural development.
• Environmental Monitoring: The Commission uses geospatial intelligence to investigate complaints regarding the deterioration of habitats protected under the Nature Directives.
• Marine Surveillance: The European Fisheries Control Agency and the European Maritime Safety Agency use the Copernicus Maritime Surveillance Service to regularly provide data to national authorities, notably identifying illegal fishery activities.
• Security: The Copernicus Border Surveillance Service is used to monitor and secure EU borders, ensuring compliance with security and immigration regulations.
• Pollution: The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service supports reporting and analysis, offering products and services that describe past, current, and future air pollution fields.

Compliance Assurance Deep Dive

The European Commission Knowledge Centre on Earth Observation (KCEO) serves as a pivotal hub for maximizing the uptake of Earth Observation (EO) products and services, to bolster EU Policies across diverse sectors. At the heart of its mission, the KCEO employs Deep Dive (DD) assessments to scrutinize EU policy requirements within specific domains, evaluate existing EO offerings, identify potential gaps, and provide recommendations for the future trajectory of the Copernicus and Research Programmes (Camia et al., 2023).

The ongoing third DD initiative is dedicated to assessing the role of EO in Compliance Assurance (CA), a domain of critical significance given the EC's central role in overseeing and enforcing EU laws. 

In the DD assessment on CA, we are considering two levels of assessment:

• State-of-the-art assessment: We evaluate the status, advancements, and capabilities of EO for various policy areas where EO has previously been used or is sufficiently mature for compliance monitoring at the Member State or EC level.
• Case-by-case assessments: Through collaborative efforts with four policy Directorates-General (DGs), we have identified specific policy areas and legislation where EO can enhance or has the potential to support compliance efforts. For these targeted areas, we are undertaking fitness-for-purpose analyses.

At the end of both assessments (scheduled for September 2024), we will provide recommendations on how EO can effectively facilitate compliance assurance activities. Additionally, we will discuss several cross-cutting topics, including assessing data accuracy and veracity, traceability and reproducibility of methods, as well as the legal constraints related to the admissibility of the data in court proceedings.

The following summary note and presentation provide further information about the policy areas and use case topics we are covering in the deep dive.

Copernicus Thematic Workshop on Compliance Assurance

On June 20^th a successful Copernicus Thematic Workshop on Compliance Assurance was organized. Attendees included stakeholders from a broad range of communities, including research, industry, government, and Copernicus Entrusted Entities, explored the evolving role of Earth Observation (EO) in supporting compliance assurance across diverse policy domains. 

The workshop was structured around three distinct objectives:

• User needs: Analyze and underscore the role of Earth Observation in compliance assurance within both the EU and the broader international policy landscape. This includes a comprehensive examination of the policy context, key regulations and policy areas, and the relevance of EO to both the public and private sectors.
• Current products and services: Review the existing challenges and opportunities related to compliance assurance within the Copernicus framework. This involves evaluating current products and services, ongoing research activities, and identifying any knowledge gaps.
• Future developments: Identify emerging needs and requirements that will contribute to shaping the future and potential development of Copernicus and EU research activities.

Presentation of all the sessions available below: