Who are we ?

Cosmos for Humanity | C4H is a Swiss NGO based in Neuchâtel whose mission is to promote the sustainable development of space activities and to act to preserve the orbital environment.

What’s the problem ?

Faced with the challenges posed by the increasing congestion of our planet's useful orbits, current approaches to space sustainability tend to be aimed solely at industry and specialised public agencies. However, citizens and companies outside the space sector are also extremely dependent on satellite capabilities to maintain their social, economic, political and environmental activities. How can we help them become aware of the consequences of orbital pollution, and give them the means to defend their own interests in outer space?

Turning citizens and companies into “New Space” stakeholders

C4H's approach responds to the challenges of space debris by empowering citizens and companies outside the space sector. Considering that we all have the right to benefit from Earth’s Orbit, as much as the duty, in maintaining environmentally and economically sustainable access to space.

If we all consume satellite data, then we are all responsible for preserving the orbital environment. As part of a partnership with the French Space Agency (CNES), Cosmos for Humanity has conceptualised an indicator, the Outer Space Footprint (OSF). Like the energy performance indicator, the OSF gives citizens and businesses the opportunity to defend their interests in space by encouraging or sanctioning the behaviour of space operators and their customers through their choice of consumption and suppliers.

C4H proposes that the OSF be adopted as the European Standard for Space Sustainability and that its display be made mandatory for all products and services directly or indirectly related to space. C4H is also campaigning for the preservation of Earth's orbits to be recognised as the 7th Environmental Objective of the European Green Taxonomy and for the obligation for European companies to document their environmental impact to be extended to their footprint on the orbital environment, under the NFRD/CSRD directives.

Turning citizens into “New Space” actors

As a complement to the OSF, C4H is running a collaborative label project designed to democratise the concept of space environmentalism. The aim is to enable as many people as possible to make a direct contribution to preserving our orbits by analysing and evaluating companies' policies on space sustainability. We intend to develop a label with a decentralised certification process that would reward citizens for collecting environmental data from companies, while giving them the power to decide on the award of the label. This label is being developed as part of a technological partnership with a blockchain in the Cosmos ecosystem so that the certification can be carried out in a transparent, independent, traceable, and unfalsifiable way. This partnership will be officially launched during the GG19.

Keep records of space pollution for the next generation

At the same time, as a form of digital immune memory, C4H will endeavour, to make all data relating to the OSF and the behaviour of operators in orbit immutable. Keeping track of this data will prove strategic over the next 50 years, in the event of saturation of Earth's orbits and snowballing instances of satellite collisions, described as Kessler's Syndrome, C4H’s indicators empower citizens to hold companies liable for their bad behaviours in outer space in the event of catastrophes that may arise. This legal sword of Damocles is a powerful lever for encouraging companies to adopt responsible policies in terms of space sustainability.

Our missions in a nutshell :

1. Develop the Outer Space Footprint (OSF) to evaluate the environmental impact of the use of satellite data on the whole value chain: from launchers and satellites operators to end-users, citizens and companies.
2. Create a citizen-led eco-label dedicated to studying the outer space environmental impact of companies. Our goal is to create a new way of looking at consumer labels, without the use of trusted third parties and in particular auditing firms that have conflicts of interest with companies.
3. Promote the incorporation of orbit protection as the 7th EU environmental objective so that OSF documentation is made mandatory for European companies (NFRD / CSRD directives) and that sustainable space activities are considered as "sustainable activities" in the sense of the European Green Taxonomy.
4. Create educational content to make English-language studies on "Space as a Commons" accessible to French-, German- and Italian-speaking communities, in order to develop the ReFi x DeSpace community in Switzerland, France, Germany and Italy.
5. Fund the development of an ecosystem dedicated to the sustainable development of space activities. Researchers and startups are currently struggling to find funding because space sustainability is not "hype" or "profitable" at the moment. We need to help them.
6. Encourage other teams to fork our stack to see other sister labels emerge on the same model for ocean preservation, forest preservation, or simply to verify carbon footprint data provided by companies.

Updates since GG18 & Beta Round :

• We have published a contribution to the European Commission' survey about the ecological transition of the European aerospace and defence industry. • We are participating in the European Commission's consultation on the future of EU space legislation. A very interesting fact for C4H: the EU is considering introducing a space label! • We applied to the Space 4 Sustainability award of the European Space Agency (ESA). We didn't win, but we did have the opportunity to get feedback on OSF from ESA officials. • We have delivered the third part of our partnership with CNES concerning OSF. Our aim now is to convince the French space agency to promote OSF within the European Union. • We produced our first educational content in French, English, Italian, German and Russian on the sustainable development of space activities. • We participated in the French translation of GreenPilled, as part of GreenPill Afrique Francophone. The eBook is available here ! • We had the opportunity to promote OSF at the "Regen Ignite" event during ETHCC in Paris at the invitation of Sparx Lab.

Next steps :

• C4H's chairwoman Claire Elss will be speaking at a conference on the environmental impact of satellites organised by the French Agency for Ecological Transition (ADEME) (20 November 2023). • Development of the first "blocks" of our technical stack (December 2023). • Operationalize our DAO using the tools offered by DAO_DAO (December 2023). • Publish our report “Citizens, New Space actors ?” written in partnership with CNES : (January 2024) • Hire a trainee in partnership with French rocket start-up HyPrSpace to increase our knowledge of Life Cycle Assessment, improve the relevance of the Outer Space Footprint, and test it in real conditions (TBC - January 2024)

How your donations will be used :

• Fund the development of our technical stack. • Creation of educational content related to the OSF, ReFi and the Commons in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish and Russian.