Memorandum 98
Supplementary submission from the British
National Space Centre (BNSC)
FUNDING OF
GMES
1. The Committee requested clarification
of how the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES)
initiative is funded. There are two sources of funding: from the
European Space Agency (ESA) through subscriptions from member
states; and from the European Union (EU) through the 7th Framework
Programme (FP7).
2. The ESA GMES Space Component programme
aims to provide the satellite infrastructure to support the GMES
services ("Sentinel" satellites, ground segment, and
access to data from other satellite missions). The original ESA
estimate was that this would cost €2.3 billion from 2006-13,
to put in place the operational space infrastructure.[27]
They were planning to fund this through 50% ESA member state subscription
(including the UK) and 50% from the EU.
3. EU funding for GMES is from the FP7 Space
programme (there is also potentially de minimis funding for space
from elsewhere in FP7, for example the Environment thematic priority).
This programme has a planned budget of €1.43 billion, over
seven years (2007-13), of which approximately €1.2 billion
is to be used for GMES. The UK contributes to this through our
net contribution to the overall budget of the EU (€157.2
million at 13.1%). Of the FP7 budget allocated to GMES, ESA has
been identified as a direct recipient of €780 million. This
is to be the EU's contribution to fund the ESA Space Component
programme, with €130 million of this for data access and
€650 million for developing the space infrastructure. On
the basis of ESA's estimated costs for the ESA Space Component
programme this leaves a shortfall of approximately €370 million
from the anticipated EU contribution. A breakdown of ESA and Commission
funding which includes the phasing of fund availability and nominal
UK contributions to the budget is provided in annex A.
4. The Commission's contribution to the
ESA Space Component programme will need to be handled and spent
by ESA in accordance with EU and FP7 rules. There are significant
differences between ESA and EU rules, including the handling of
intellectual property rights, procurement rules, the participating
countries, and the issue of geo-return—a fundament of ESA
programmes but not allowable under EU programmes. A joint ESA-Commission
Financial Engineering group is looking into how the transfer and
ESA spending of these funds will have to be handled but has yet
to conclude its work on this.
5. The remaining FP7 Space Programme budget
allocated to GMES will be spent through more typical framework
programme mechanisms, to help establish pre-operational GMES environmental
and civil security monitoring and information services.
6. At present there are no operational funding
lines within the Commission for the operation of GMES satellite
infrastructure or services.
March 2007
27 GMES from concept to reality [COM(2005)565]. Back
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