SAFE is a voluntary-based initiative. It aims to encourage the environmental monitoring in long–term to grasp the environmental changes that may be useful to bring in risk reduction and adaptation programs for disasters risk related activities to other climate change associated problems using space applications, especially satellite remote sensing technology. Some of the changing environment parameters in water resources, river water level, land cover, deforestation, agricultural production, and ecosystem could provide through satellite remote sensing.

Both Sentinel Asia and SAFE are complementary to each other. SAFE could provide satellite based information for long-term monitoring of a natural phenomenon that could provide insight of forthcoming disaster event due to current climate changes. Also, SAFE can continue providing satellite based recovery information of a given disaster even after the cease of Sentinel Asia activities as an emergency response system. In Sentinel Asia system, the speed of response is quite important because the lead time for immediate response is vital where information of infrastructure, location, population etc. need to be analyzed to reduce the damage. Also, the data should provide easy to understand information for emergency response activities. Contrast to this, SAFE considers continuous data provision with sensor data that could provide environment sensitive information with varying spectral and spatial resolution for better understanding the status of the environment and its changes.

In the application areas of space technology, both SAFE and Sentinel Asia has a clear distinction in timeline as well as information content. SAFE is a more robust approach for long-term monitoring of our natural environment with satellite remote sensing to evaluate current status, understand the changes, monitor the nature of changes and where possible use as base information for risk management and adaptation. Further, the end users of SAFE are the agencies and experts work on various agencies that are responsible for the environment. These agencies have their own mandate, functionalities and responsibilities to sustainable management of the environment whereas in Sentinel Asia system the focus was the collaboration of Disaster management agencies.