Enhancing environmental data sharing: Policy brief Recommendations on Managing Data in the Green Deal Data Space

The Green Deal Data Space (GDDS) is one of the common European data spaces envisioned by the European Commission in order to support the Green Deal’s priority actions in sharing data. It aims to unlock the full potential of environmental data, much of which currently remains fragmented, inaccessible, or underutilised, hindering Europe’s progress toward its climate and environmental goals. The GDDS will be implemented through the SAGE project (The Data Space for a Sustainable Green Europe) and will abide by the FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability), fostering the exchange of data between public and private entities during Europe’s green transition.

Four EU projects – AD4GD, B-Cubed, FAIRiCUBE and USAGE –  have explored and documented the requirements for successfully building the GDDS and have published a joint policy brief, presenting a set of recommendations on data harmonisation, semantic interoperability, metadata management, data exchange and governance. 

These projects highlight that the GDDS should be able to offer diverse types of environmental and biodiversity data by ensuring strong data harmonisation. For that, it is key to apply existing standards, expand them when needed and invest in format transformation tools. Besides, data should be easily understood both by people and machines. That means increasing its semantic interoperability. How can it be done? By describing scientific variables using stable, adaptable, well-defined concepts compiled in agreed-upon vocabularies supported by strong technical infrastructures and governance rules. In this sense, the projects also highlight the human and technical effort required to curate metadata, that is, the critical information that describes the data. This fact should be recognised by the funding bodies and the formats used for creating this metadata should be further adapted to user needs and their interoperability with others, increased. 

In fact, data spaces are all about data exchange. If the GDDS is to engage diverse users, ranging from a public research centre to a private company, effective strategies must be developed to ensure a balanced representation of public and commercial data within the data space in a mutually trusted environment. For that, the policy brief recommends the use of standardised, GDPR-compliant, federated technologies for data provision.

In addition, the success of the GDDS is highly dependent on its effective governance framework. Establishing inclusive and participatory governance rules is the one path to ensure the GDDS prioritises public interest, long-term sustainability and widespread use. 

Read the full policy brief here.

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AD4GD (All Data for Green Deal) - ID No 101061001, B3 (Biodiversity Building Blocks for policy) - ID No 101059592, FAIRiCUBE (F.A.I.R. Information Cubes) - ID No 101059238 and USAGE (Urban Data Space for Green Deal) - ID No 101059950 receive funding from the European Union's Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Programme. Views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Commission. Neither the EU nor the EC can be held responsible for them.

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