Preparatory actions for the Green Deal Data Space

Outcomes and deliverables

• A sustainable data governance scheme as well as a blueprint that connects existing national, regional and local data ecosystems and enables public and private stakeholders to access relevant data; and to develop cross-sector data services.
• A priority list of datasets relevant to the European Green Deal Strategy;
• A roadmap towards the common European Green Deal data space

The Green Deal data space will interconnect^[1] currently fragmented and dispersed data from various ecosystems^[2], both for/from the private and public sectors. It will offer an interoperable, trusted IT environment, for data processing, and a set of rules of legislative, administrative and contractual nature that determine the rights of access to and processing of the data. The data space will also establish links with activities in other EU programmes such as Horizon Europe (in particular those funded under Cluster 4 “Digital, Industry and Space”, Cluster 5 “Climate, energy and Mobility”, Cluster 6 “Food, Bioeconomy, Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment” and the relevant Missions) and the space programmes (e.g. Galileo and Copernicus) providing massive amounts of data including in real time. In order to coordinate among the various initiatives contributing to the Green Deal objectives, the project will propose a roadmap for the deployment of a full-fledged common European Green Deal data space and liaise with potential users and other relevant actors to ensure synergies between users and infrastructures..

The Green Deal data space will be set up in synergy with the various relevant initiatives implementing the Green Deal Goals. In particular, in the context of this Work Programme, synergies will target:

• Relevant high quality data is expected to derive from the activities related to High Value Datasets^[3] in the framework of the Public sector Open data for AI and Open Data Platform (see topic 2.2.2.2).
• Data from other sectoral data spaces where relevant.
• The topics implementing Destination Earth initiative (see section 5.1.1). It will also contribute through the development of a very high precision digital model of the Earth to enable visualising, monitoring and forecasting natural and human activity on the planet in support of sustainable development.
• To complement the work during the first two years, a Coordination and Support Action on Digital Product Passport (see topic 5.1.3) will prepare the ground for a future common European data space for smart circular applications.

The funding will enable the establishment of a data governance mechanism, with a detailed roadmap on how the data space should progressively develop into a pan-European Green Deal data space, by connecting EU programmes, national, regional and local data ecosystems at the EU level.

The roadmap should describe how to integrate the various activities contributing to the common European Green Deal data space in line with existing policy priorities and existing initiatives, enabling all relevant actors to access and re-use data needed for their purposes in compliance with the dataspace governance scheme. To this end, the roadmap should ensure that relevant users such as climate and environmental scientists are able to access and exploit the opportunities offered by Green Deal Data Space. Action to address potential barriers to such use cases should be identified in advance.

The action will have to work in partnership with the Data Spaces Support Centre (see topic 2.2.2.1) in order to ensure alignment with the European Data Spaces Technical Framework and the rest of the ecosystem of data spaces in section 2.2.1 thereof. The joint work will target the definition of:

• the data space reference architecture, building blocks and common toolboxes to be used;
• the common standards, including semantic standards and interoperability protocols, both domain-specific and crosscutting;
• The data governance models, business models and strategies for running data spaces.

The action should also establish links to relevant initiatives under the Green Deal to ensure a user-driven development of the data space, in particular those (e.g. Horizon Europe activities such as the Green Deal Missions) that will provide significant opportunities to test, experiment and up-scale the input to and use of the data space with local partners.

[1] Data sets may include e.g. High Value Datasets (e.g. from the Environmental, Meteorological and Geospatial thematic areas), Earth Observation data (e.g. Copernicus), Member States and participating EEA EFTA states / Associated countries’ INSPIRE platforms, satellite images, IoT/sensor data, sensitive public data, private data with public interest as well as citizens’ data (in line with GDPR).

[2] e.g. the European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet) platform in the maritime domain, the EGDI – The European Geological Data Infrastructure, Copernicus programme and its DIAS (data and information access services).

[3] E.g. from the Environmental, Meteorological and Geospatial thematic areas