XL Conferenza italiana di scienze regionali

The purpose of this research is to illustrate, within the general framework of the knowledge economy, the state-of-art of the space economy and, within it, of space-borne Earth Observations (EO). Indeed, in the current space-time compression, social conflicts should evolve into social cooperation, as all individuals and institutions are called to play a role in the activation of a process of resilient transformation toward sustainable development, i.e. in elaborating a sustainable conception of space and time. Within this general framework, social and territorial inequalities caused by (social and territorial) distance costs should be targeted in order to eradicate persistent forms of marginalization, poverty and exclusion. Specifically, action should be focused on present and future peripheral groups and places, in accordance with the principle of inter and intragenerational equity. Laying on these premises, EO can play a key role in collecting (not only) environmental information at the global scale, providing a crucial contribution in achieving most of the Sustainable Development Goals, as widely documented by the Group on Earth Observations (GEO, 2017). Furthermore, the EO value chain requires the activation of several other sectors, within the space economy and more in general pertaining to the scientific domain, and each of them can generate technological spillovers in many other economic sectors of activity.