Roya Ayazi, General Secretary
Interview
Sustainable Development Goals are closely linked to region-based skills and challenges that regional decision makers, administrations and citizens have to deal with on a daily basis, such as sustainable food production, clean water, better management of natural disasters and economic growth.
As a network of European regions NEREUS’ mission is to show that Space is an indispensable instrument to accomplish these policies and to respond to the related challenges.
Through our flagship initiative, Copernicus4Regions, we collect concrete user experiences and stories about how regions are successfully using the European Earth Observation mission Copernicus to tackle these challenges so that we can team up at an interregional level. This approach has proved very effective in the area of natural disasters, such as forest fires and floods but also other domains . In these situations, space data is not just ‘handy’, it is indispensable – literally a ‘life-saver’.
The citizen is at the centre of our vision of sustainable development. To us, the citizen must be the beneficiary of better policies, better emergency management, and better territorial management. To us, though, the citizen is also a protagonist, someone who brings about change and who grasps the opportunities of Space.
