Full alignment with EU Policies to effectively address Societal Impact(s)
Synergies between earth science communities, highperformance computing, and data-driven operations have the potential of enabling novel innovation opportunities and pave the way for the realization of brand-new applications and services. PHIDIAS foresees a large social impact in terms of overall environmental monitoring capabilities enabled by the pooling of different stakeholders, namely: researchers, public authorities, private players, and citizen scientists. By federating different data sources, PHIDIAS will provide, on one hand, an interoperable and easy to use catalogue of environmental resources accessible and browsable by anybody, and, on the other hand, will provide researchers and practitioners with a platform on top of which new knowledge and new business models can be developed.
Systemic changing solution is explicitly mentioned by the “European environment — state and outlook 2020”1 as the single unambiguous message for all policy makers in Europe. The report clearly states that besides doing numerically more in addressing sustainability challenges we need also to start thinking to tackle them in new way. In this context, PHIDIAS can support a broad range of stakeholders with actionable information that can be used to implement practicable and measurable solutions for a more sustainable future. As an example, large cloud computing providers operating in multiple continents will be able to tap into the large knowledge base provided by PHIDIAS to predict where energy could be cheaper (e.g. due to better environmental predictions, and thus moving some computing tasks to datacentres located in those areas).
Moreover, the current attempts at meeting the air quality standards defined by the EU Ambient Air Quality Directives2 is current only possible thanks to the official reports on air quality provided by the individual countries. However, air quality monitoring is far from being a single country matter, since pollution produced in any country has undoubtedly an impact on a global scale. As result, the holistic approach pursued by PHIDIAS in consolidating environmental information on the air quality from multiple sources, is going to equip policy makers worldwide with important data for their operations and fundamental decisions.
The Mission Board on Healthy Oceans, Seas, Coastal and Inland Waters3 aims at a measurable improvement in the conditions of our oceans and waters by 2030. Starting from the famous motto that “If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Improve It”, the action of PHIDIAS can provide policy makers with actionable information to be turned into directives or new legislation. At the same time, PHIDIAS can help both researchers to explore new research directions, but it can also help citizens that want to protect their local resources by demonstrating how small everyday choices can have a tangible impact. Finally, it is also worth stressing that the social dimension cannot be underestimated, it is however our standpoint that the transparent access to environmental data enabled by PHIDIAS can allow to provide also due care to the players and countries that could be negatively affected by low-carbon economy.
1https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/soer-2020
2https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/air-quality-in-europe-2019
