Environmental Crimes
Environmental Crimes supports teams developing space-based commercial services through proof-of-concept studies and pilots to help organisations detect, trace, and verify environmental crime risks.
Funder: European Space Agency
Due Dates: October 19, 2026 (Submissions open) | October 21, 2026 (Webinar) | June 25, 2027, 13:00 CEST (APQ deadline)
Funding Amounts: Zero-equity co-funding of up to 50–80% of activity costs, depending on SME status and Member State approval
Summary: Supports proof-of-concept studies and pilot projects developing space-based commercial services to detect, trace, and verify environmental crime.
Key Information: Full Proposals require written funding authorisation from the National Delegations covering industrial partners’ countries.
Description
The European Space Agency’s Environmental Crimes call supports proof-of-concept studies and pilot projects under ACCESS Business Applications and Space Solutions (BASS). It seeks pre-operational commercial downstream services that help organisations, enforcement bodies, and corporate users detect, monitor, trace, and verify environmental crime risks across global operations. Relevant areas include greenwashing and environmental fraud, wildlife trafficking, illegal fishing and marine dumping, unauthorised mining, illegal logging, waste shipments, and industrial pollution.
Proposals must respond to practical market demand and active user needs rather than pure academic research or basic scientific data exploration. Satellite Earth observation, navigation, or communications must be essential to the service and deliver measurable advantages over terrestrial alternatives. Teams may address the published partner use cases or propose independent commercial concepts aligned with environmental crime.
