Economy bY spacE (EYE) Impact of Covid-19 outbreak on European economies

ALMA Sistemi Srl awarded another H2020 project focussed on Covid-19 impact on Economy monitored by space.
Space technology connected with Artificial Intelligence and machine learning techniques is one of the most rapidly developing field of science and also play a key role to control disaster by space like Covid-19 outbreak. The collaboration between space and information technology fields can generate significant advances in disaster management and recovery.
There are a significant number of indirect parameters observable from space that can be correlated to the impact on the economy of natural, health (including epidemic) and man-made disasters.
Classical environment parameters (geographical, climatological and hydrogeological) and man induced impact on the environment (pollution, heat) can be combined with economic parameters of human activities impacted by the epidemic including transportation, industry, and commerce. Specific human activities can be directly correlated with the progression of the diseases i.e. increase of heat delivered by crematorium in the affected areas as well as in the dwelling areas due to lock-down restrictions.
All these “observed parameters” need to be correlated to macro parameters related to the progress of the epidemic and its impact to the economy at different scales. At medium- and long-term time scale, this methodology enables the near real-time monitoring of macroeconomic parameters during the recovery phase following the end of the emergency outbreak.
The project EYE intends to propose a pre-operational service based on Copernicus data integrated with statistic and geospatial data into an IT platform able to provide automate image processing supported by artificial intelligence algorithms and forecasting models to assess the impact on the economy of the Covid-19 epidemic at different scales (Regional/National/European).
EYE platform will be an important decision support tool for the Public authorities at different scale (National, regional and local) as well as to economic operators interested in the assessment (and rating) of local and national economies.
The platform will be initially targeted to Italy and Spain as the most affected area of Covid-19 in Europe with extensions to Cyprus and Greece and with the potential to be operative for the whole Europe and worldwide.
In the pictures below[1] Long Beach container yard on February 8^th (left) and March 17^th 2020 (right) showing the slowing of business in container transportation.

[1] Source BBC / MAXAR