This year is one of the most important with major milestones linked to global policy agendas. There is the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, there is also the 15^th Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development and the UN Decade of Ecosystem Restoration. These all bring a new set of challenges and opportunities for the international EO community.

The creation of the SAFERS platform and Intelligent Services for efficient forest fire management is grounded on a human- centred approach which includes co-design. An online survey and a fully virtual International User Requirements Workshop (IURW) were performed to gather end-user needs and co-design the SAFERS Plaform and Intelligent services key functionalities.

Organised by the project coordinator LINKS, SAFERS project held its 2^nd General Assembly on the 7^th and 8^th October 2021 in a hybrid format, in which the progress of the project and the activities were shared and discussed within the consortium. In addition, a panel of external attendees and the members of the Advisory Board participated in the design review.

A general appreciation emerged for the good participation of both the consortium and a wide external audience in the early activities on Innovation co-design (WP2), despite being held during the pandemic. These activities generated a twofold output: on one side the activities allowed to produce a meaningful set of operationally-oriented requirements that have been engineered to drive the technical developments. On the other side, it has allowed us to build a common knowledge base of the context and actors, which is very useful for preparing the next piloting activities.