October 4, 2016

CNES and the environment New policy instituted

France is tackling environmental issues head on at both national and international levels, as illustrated by the historic success of the COP21 in Paris last December. Committed as a government agency to meeting national goals and assuring legal and regulatory compliance, CNES is applying a new environmental management policy geared towards making it more energy efficient through three key areas of innovation.

CNES has always paid close attention to the environmental impacts of its activities, achieving ISO 14001 certification and carefully monitoring the impacts of launch operations at the Guiana Space Centre on flora and fauna, air quality, soil and rivers. And with France’s recent law on energy transition for green growth, it now has a framework to seek new efficiencies.

To this end, CNES is applying a new environmental management policy in three key areas of innovation:
-    Environmental contributions and benefits of CNES missions, helping to protect the environment and curb climate change through space missions
-    Controlling the environmental impacts of designing and operating space systems by developing eco-design concepts and promoting effective control of space debris at international level
-    Controlling the impacts of CNES field centres and facilities, notably by striving to refurbish its buildings to energy class B standard while making more use of certified renewable energy sources and reducing and recycling waste

CNES has constantly sought through development of space assets to advance our understanding of Earth’s environment and climate. Indeed, satellites were the first to provide evidence of rising sea level driven by global warming. As well as tightly controlling its environmental impacts, CNES continues to further space’s contribution to tacking environmental and climate issues, notably through the New Delhi Declaration1 that it was instrumental in establishing, and to conceive new missions designed to measure essential climate variables (ECVs). In particular, it is currently developing two greenhouse-gas-monitoring missions: MicroCarb to monitor carbon gases and MERLIN to measure atmospheric methane.

1https://presse.cnes.fr/en/new-delhi-declaration-space-agency-heads-reaff...

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Contacts
Pascale Bresson    Tel. +33 (0)1 44 76 75 39    pascale.bresson@cnes.fr
Julien Watelet    Tel. +33 (0)1 44 76 78 37    julien.watelet@cnes.fr