InCubed: Virtual session unveils funding opportunities
The Portuguese Space Agency is holding a webinar on the ESA InCubed Portugal - OT for Municipalities call, which has 1.5 million euros to co-finance the development of solutions that contribute to the modernisation of Portuguese cities.
The ESA InCubed Portugal—Earth Observation for Municipalities competition, part of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) InCubed (Investing in Industrial Innovation) programme, has 1.5 million euros to co-fund the development of solutions that contribute to the modernisation of Portuguese cities, benefit local communities, and promote the development of more innovative and sustainable cities in Portugal.
The rules of the competition, as well as the eligibility criteria and technical requirements for the projects, will be presented at an information session scheduled for March 3rd at 2 pm. The Portuguese Space Agency’s Earth Observation (EO) Officer, Carolina Sá, and ESA’s Earth Observation Systems Project Manager, Iñigo Alonso, will also be available to answer any questions participants may have.
Registration for the session requires prior registration in the Space Technologies Community on the B2Match platform, created in partnership with AED Cluster Portugal, which will be formally launched during the webinar. For now, this virtual community is promoting meetings between different players in the Earth Observation sector and municipalities, intending to form partnerships for the InCubed call. However, the Agency and AED Cluster Portugal want to broaden the scope of the platform, which should evolve into a real community for meeting space and non-space sectors, including areas such as agriculture, environmental management, security, transport and urban planning, where space technologies can have direct and impactful applications. Now and in the future, the community will promote collaboration between companies, research centres and municipal entities, helping to identify innovative solutions and strengthen the national space ecosystem.
“Throughout the last year, we have travelled to various mainland and island regions to introduce EO and its potential applications to municipalities. During these interactions, we identified several challenges specific to Portuguese cities that allowed us to create a list of topics, which, although not exhaustive, allows companies to know which problems they should address,” says Carolina Sá, Earth Observation Officer at the Portuguese Space Agency. Through this competition, the Agency aims to identify projects that exploit the potential of EO data to solve specific city challenges in areas such as environmental management and monitoring (namely air and water quality, waste management and climate change), sustainable urban planning, emergency management, infrastructure monitoring, among others, including data integration and visualisation solutions to support decision-making.
Proposals can be submitted via the OSIP platform until June 2nd, 2025. There will be two evaluation periods: March 12th and June 2nd, 2025. Selected projects will receive funding and technical support to develop and implement their ideas.
