ABSTRACT
The initiative on GMES is a bold and some would say brave development in Europe. While GMES is specifically European, there are many characteristics in common with any global monitoring programme. There is no doubt that political will is needed to leverage the relatively large financial investments envisaged. Even when finance is justified and committed, because global monitoring covers a wide range of disparate datasets there will always be the challenge of enabling access to data when the organisations providing the data have different objectives, agendas and modes of operation.
