G-SEXTANT (service provision of geospatial intelligence in EU External Actions support) is an EU FP7 project, which—within the context of the Copernicus (former GMES) Initiative—aims at consolidating a portfolio of Earth Observation products and services that support the geospatial information needs of the European External Action Service. Its main focus lies on the development of pre-operational services in the framework of pre-defined scenarios (e.g. humanitarian crisis, exploitation of natural resources), the definition of products to respond to the user’s demands, and the development of a standardized product portfolio.
In addition to the European External Action Service, the International Atomic Energy Agency, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Cartographic Section of United Nations, European Union Satellite Centre rank among the users.
The G-SEXTANT project consortium under the lead of INDRA consists of 14 partners from industry, institutional organizations, and EU organizations. The two-year project started on 1 January 2013. 
Natural resources are sometimes exploited beyond a sustainable level, spoil natural habitats, affect people's livelihoods and even fuel armed conflicts. Large-scale land acquisitions, often labeled as ‘land grabbing’, tend to be highly obscure and conflictive. There is also a lack of information as to how these investments change land use practices and affect people’s livelihood security in the affected areas. Precise geographic information is one necessary component for designing appropriate provisions to prevent and to respond to ongoing crises related to natural resources exploitation or large-scale land acquisitions. 
Together with its partners DLR and Z_GIS, BICC is mainly involved in developing processing chains and products that aim at providing conditioned geospatial information on the mining of minerals, oil exploitation, land use changes and large-scale land acquisitions. On the basis of user needs identified during the course of the project and by combining remote sensing methodologies and data with social and political sciences research methods and data, existing pre-operational services can be enhanced.