Action Group on the Green Deal Data Space

The Green Deal Data Space (GDDS) is one of the common European data spaces defined by the European Strategy for Data and dedicated to support the priority actions of the Green Deal in terms of sharing high value and high quality datasets for biodiversity preservation, zero pollution, circular economy, climate change mitigation, deforestation reduction, smart mobility and environmental compliance. It emerges as the intersection between the green and the digital transformation. Industries, governments, and researchers will benefit from easy sharing of high quality, interoperable data and derived services, while data holders and providers maintain control over who and how access is provided.

The GDDS will therefore be established on solid foundations of technologies, governance and trust, respecting European values and applying the principles of findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability (FAIR). It is also a goal to interconnect currently fragmented and dispersed cross-sectorial data from diverse origins, including private, public sectors and citizen generated data, in support of the Green Deal priorities. It is therefore one of the most diverse and transversal European common data spaces.

The ultimate goal is to offer an interoperable, trusted digital environment for high value and high quality data, and a set of legislative, administrative and contractual rules that determine the rights of access to and use of the data. This will benefit businesses, consumers, government and citizens, connecting public and private data system of systems and allowing reuse of data across borders and sectors within the defined trusted space.

The European Green Deal stands as the European Commission’s ambitious roadmap to transform society and economy towards combating climate change and its derived challenges. Through this comprehensive strategy, the EU aspires to become the world’s first resource-efficient and competitive economy, achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

The Green Deal targets a very diverse range of topics of great importance for the health of our planet including climate change, circular economy, pollution, biodiversity and deforestation. These priorities relate to established European directives such as the 2030 Biodiversity Strategy and the recently approved Nature Restoration Law or the European Climate Law, as an integral part of the Commission’s strategy to implement the Paris Agreement and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Data, services and digital technologies play a pivotal role in realizing this green transformation. The Green Deal advocates for accessible and interoperable data to be at the heart of innovation and recognizes that edge computing, the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence and other digital assets are critical enablers of impactful climate policies.

A data space is a digital environment that enables the reliable exchange of data while retaining sovereignty, and ensuring trust and security under a set of mutually agreed rules. Data spaces benefit from consolidated data management strategy designed to ensure semantic interoperability and integration of data from different sources. In a Spatial Data Infrastructure trust was based on the reputation of a reduced group of data providers (mainly public administrations) while in the data space, trust is established between a digitally certified data provider and an authorized recipient under rules defined in digital contracts and data licenses. In Spatial Data infrastructures the focus was on data access for providers while in data spaces the focus is on a more symmetrical data exchange among all participants. Data spaces should allow exchange of both open data and private data respecting the privacy and sensitive data rules and regulations.

Europe is to become a role model for a society where data empower both business and the public sector to make better decisions. The European Strategy for Data supports the creation of a single European Data Space, defined as a single market for data with secure and easy data sharing mechanisms that boosts growth and value within the EU laws and regulations. This market would be open for data from across the world, both open and private/protected data including also sensitive business data, enabling industry exchange enormous amounts of high-quality data.

The route towards materializing these aspirations involves the prior creation of up to 14 common European data spaces that are expected to bring together relevant data infrastructures and governance frameworks in strategic sectors. The aim is to overcome legal and technical barriers to data sharing by combining the necessary tools and services in an interoperable and reusable way.

The benefits of these common European dataspaces range from more conscious energy consumption to smart mobility, more sustainable agriculture, quality healthcare and the development of high precision digital models of the Earth (Digital Twins) to monitor, better understand, anticipate and react to environmental and climate change challenges ahead of us, as well as eventual disasters and crises.