Resulting from the dramatic decline in the ice cover, new economic opportunities are emerging, such as new traffic routes for the transport of goods from east to west and access to recently accessible natural resources. However, these changes have the potential to increase environmental threats and security concerns in the region coming from interest on the intensive exploitation of natural resources on the artic land areas; increasing risk of seaborne disaster and oil spills or establishment of permanent human facilities compromising European security. The consensus within the EU to maintain a multilateral cooperation approach to ensure stability and dialogued solution in the region triggers an increasing demand of situational awareness for the EU.

The objective of ARCOS is to design and implement an early-warning system providing continuous monitoring of the Arctic Region. Designed to generate actionable products in the security domain by processing and fusing multi-sensor data, the system integrates available information from space, non-space sources and products available from multiple Copernicus services.

ARCOS generates information at three different levels of scale and user interaction:
- Level 1. Automatic Early-warning System. Integration of space and non-space data sources for the triggering of alarms on the region when certain conditions are met. Automatic early-warnings are generated in case anomalous behaviours are detected. For this wide-area monitoring, automatic extraction of analytics and AI techniques are applied.
- Level 2. User-Driven Alert System, where space and non-space data is processed on specific locations provided by the user. The alarms can be configured based contextual information based on the user input.
- Level 3. Geospatial Intelligence Products. Following early-warnings generated in Level 1 or 2, geospatial intelligence products requiring human intervention are provided upon user request.