BRUSSELS — In Europe’s fight against wildfires, eyes are turning toward the sky: not just looking for rain or water-dropping Canadair planes, but also for ways to exploit new satellite capabilities to help contain or even prevent new blazes.
Satellites and the images and data they gather from space are increasingly seen as a means of providing European governments and firefighters on the ground with more accurate information: to map damage and detect fires at an early stage.
Such help is more than welcome during another scorching European summer with wildfires in France, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Approximately 600,000 hectares have burned across EU countries since the start of the year. Just last weekend, Belgium was hit by one of the largest wildfires in its history, in the High Fens nature reserve.
Still, this latest use of satellites is another reminder that Europe needs to step up its game in yet another strategic arena. After Elon Musk’s Starlink showed how satellite-based services could revolutionize everything from mobile communication to waging war, space technology for disaster management offers a potential avenue for Europe to compete.
Greece, a country that seems to be battling bigger wildfires every summer, was the first to act.
In early May, a rocket of Musk’s SpaceX carried four small satellites into space with the specific task of helping the country detect and track wildfires in near real time. It was a crucial step in the build-out of the “Hellenic Fire System,” which the Greek government boasted was the first national satellite system of its kind.
The system was set up through European-wide collaboration, with the help of the European Space Agency, its Greek counterpart, German wildfire intelligence platform Ororatech and Finnish radar-based satellite provider ICEYE.
“By integrating space-based capabilities into our emergency response systems, we are equipping our fire services with the tools they need to respond faster,” Dimitrios Papastergiou, Greece’s minister of digital governance and artificial intelligence, said at the launch in May.
The satellites that were launched before the summer were equipped with two infrared imagers. Those pick up the heat energy radiated by fires, allowing satellites to detect hotspots and gauge their intensity.
The system is designed to “support early detection of emerging hotspots and continuous monitoring of fire behavior,” the European Space Agency said.
Satellites’ role in gathering vast, real-time data and images can also help with other extreme weather events. The Finnish company ICEYE offers monitoring services for governments and businesses to manage both natural catastrophes, such as floods and wildfires, and man-made ones, such as illegal deforestation.
ICEYE raised €1 billion in new financing this year, and became the first company to get backing from the Scaleup Europe Fund, a new fund backed by the European Commission to help companies expand rapidly.
“If we want to be effective in managing the environment around us, both in terms of growth and development, as well as preventing or managing natural catastrophes, these sorts of space-based systems are extremely effective,” ICEYE CEO Rafal Modrzewski told POLITICO.
He said the company has been mostly focused on “managing” wildfires, but is now “trying to push towards predicting wildfires or at least detecting them in an earlier stage.” Modrzewski says a similar offering is available for floods, and for wind damage stemming from hurricanes and typhoons.
The impact can be maximized if Brussels becomes a coordinating “buyer” of those services. “Using space-based capabilities is much more effectively done on an EU scale through [the European] Commission than on a national scale in 27 separate nations,” Modrzewski said.
The Commission is already prominent in helping governments and emergency services map and detect wildfires. The European Forest Fire Information System, which sits within the Commission’s research desk, maps both active fires and burned areas based on data from NASA’s MODIS and the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-3, an Earth observation satellite.
Currently, data and images arrive every 10 minutes, but the launch of a new satellite from the Meteosat third generation next Thursday should speed that up — with images arriving every 2.5 minutes, improving detection and even forecasting of possible wildfires.
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