ERA PLANET MANAGEMENT: SOME KEY ASPECTS -

The H2020 Program - ERA NET COFUND ERA-PLANET - The European Network for Observing our Changing Planet (Grant Agreement No. 689443) of five-year duration (http://www.era-planet.eu) coordinated by Nicola Pirrone Director of CNR-IIA (www.iia.cnr.it), sees the participation of 34 research organizations, including research centers and universities, belonging to 14 EU countries and an associate country, all leaders in the domain of Earth Observation (EO) in coherence with the European participation to Group on Earth Observation (GEO) and the Copernicus. The main features of ERA-PLANET was the launch of a Joint Trans-national Call, open only to the beneficiaries of the ERA-PLANET Program, which through a two-step selection process, (September 2016 - May 2017) has saw the involvement of two external commissions of expert evaluators. The result of the call was a ranking list with four projects approved and financed. They started on September 1, 2017: SMURBS (SMarturban Solutions for air quality, disasters and city growth) coordinated by the NOA (GR), GEOEssential (Essential Variables workflows for resource efficiency and environmental management) coordinated by UNIGE (SWISS), IGOSP (Integrated Global Observatory Systems for Persistent Pollutants) coordinated by CNR-IIA (IT), iCUPE (Integrative and Comprehensive Understanding on Polar Environments) coordinated by UHEL (FI).