Starion’s leadership of the development of SAFEPLACE, a European crisis management platform, has been in the spotlight in Belgium this week as European countries suffer the worst wildfires for many years. The platform is designed to help civil protection organisations and public authorities make faster, better-informed decisions during emergencies by fusing space and terrestrial data sources into a single environment.
In October 2024, Starion’s experts in Belgium and Spain, together with partner organisations, started development of the Safety Platform for Crisis and Emergency (SAFEPLACE), which is designed to provide situational awareness to crisis and disaster management organisations, supported by satellite services and data. The 3-year SAFEPLACE project is an initiative within the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Civil Security from Space (CSS) programme.
At a time when the impacts of climate change are making certain extreme events more frequent and more severe, SAFEPLACE will provide a practical tool to help authorities anticipate, coordinate and manage crises more effectively. To do so, it fuses data from a wide range of sources into a single environment, including satellite imagery, satellite communications, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, weather data, drones, communication networks and other information systems used by emergency services. The objective is to provide improved situational awareness in near real time, supporting the coordination of operations on the ground.
“This summer has been unprecedented in terms of the wildfires across Europe. Our Starion colleagues working on SAFEPLACE have been interacting with civil protection organisations and individuals, including firefighters, extensively since we started this project, so these events feel very real to us. On behalf of Starion and especially the SAFEPLACE team, I would like to extend our condolences to all those affected by the wildfires in any way and express our gratitude to those working hard and risking their lives to manage these critical situations. This is a real incentive for all of us to push forward as fast as possible with the development of SAFEPLACE to provide additional support to those on the frontline.” – Alastair Pidgeon, Starion Chief Technology Officer
SAFEPLACE is focusing on four use cases, which are crises caused by floods, wildfires, toxic substance spills and earthquakes. Two demonstrations have already taken place in Belgium and Spain, and the project will culminate in a live demonstration involving crisis management organisations and first responders. Starion is also leading the development of a Luxembourg extension to the SAFEPLACE crisis response platform, focusing on flooding and humanitarian use cases.
Coordinated by Starion, SAFEPLACE is being developed by a European consortium that includes the Liège Space Centre (CSL), VITO, Vodafone, Campus Vesta, as well as Spacebel and constellr for the Belgian wildfire demonstration activities. The project is being carried out in close collaboration with operational stakeholders in Belgium, Spain, Luxembourg and Germany.
For more information, including details of all consortium partners and stakeholders, please see the related news stories below and then contact us for further details.
