The impact of the project will be felt in many ways, especially in the environmental, societal, technical and industrial field.
Environmental
Citizens often feel that their efforts won’t have much impact on environmental policies and climate change. Scent will show that citizens in fact can have a real impact in environmental monitoring and identification of flood risks.
Major environmental agencies and decision-makers have agreed to promote the project outcomes, which will guarantee EU-wide environmental impact.
Societal
Scent will foster innovation and create jobs in SMEs, which will help fight unemployment in Europe.
Scent will also improve the accuracy of existing flood risk maps by more than 15% and thus make areas close to floodplains less vulnerable to disasters.
Scent promotes an open method of coordinating environmental policies. It will include regional environmental groups, public-private partnerships and citizen communities in land-use monitoring, which will encourage innovative governance schemes.
Technical
Scent will bring about new technological developments and products through the SCENT toolbox, and citizens’ contributions to environmental data will be fed directly into the Scent intelligence engine. These will be key in generating precise and up-to-date land-use maps and flood risk maps for decision-makers.
Scent will also extend the GEOSS and Copernicus repositories through frequent updates of local monitoring of land-use changes using the Scent Toolbox.
Industrial
Scent will introduce low-cost state-of-the-art tools that will encourage further innovation and boost the development of new people-centric apps, products and services.
The Scent observatory will promote Europe in the global environmental monitoring market. Citizen engagement will foster the creation of new SMEs and boost innovation in current European SMEs. Scent will reveal an untapped potential for the gaming industry and the crowd-sourcing and social media industries to enter the environmental field.