Summary form only given. ERA-ORA is a co-operative project funded by the European Commission within the Environment and Climate research and technological development programme in the field of space techniques applied to environmental monitoring and research. This contribution aims at informing the remote-sensing community about the project, so that the interested scientists can possibly benefit from its achievements. The general objective of this concerted action is to improve the radar data analysis and utilization tools developed by European researchers for Earth observation from space.