The aim of the initiative was to deliver generic services for science data preservation as part of the data infrastructure for e-science and to build on the experience of the ESA Earth Observation Long Term Data Preservation (LTDP) programme to favour the set-up of a European Framework for the long term preservation of Earth Science (ES) data through the definition of common preservation policies, the harmonization of metadata and semantics and the deployment of the generic infrastructure services in the ES domain. The generic preservation services addressed the issues of science data persistent storage, access and management and were built on the already proven research prototype services from the FP6 CASPAR project. The results were evaluated and tuned in depth, using Earth Science as pathfinder, and broadly but less deeply across other disciplines linked to the Alliance for Permanent Access (APA) and ESFRI clusters. As such the Initiative paved the way for the establishment of the core of a persistent and robust Earth Science infrastructure in Europe, starting from the infrastructure of the partners involved in the SCIDIP-ES consortium, able to respond to the needs of data-intensive science applications addressing for example environmental, climate change and disaster monitoring applications. SCIDIP-ES made a significant step forward in the challenge of properly preserving the digitally encoded information, and in particular Earth Science measurements which can never be repeated, and yet on which a multitude of ecological, economic and political decisions must be based in the future.