The solar physics community was involved in the development of the project from the beginning: i) creation of the EAST consortium, ii) elaboration of the conceptual design study, iii) I3 Trans-National Access network SOLARNET and iv) GREST project. The solar astronomy community is organized through SOLARNET and ASTRONET and operates with success, since the last decades, a set of national observing facilities and infrastructures on the Canary Islands including the Swedish Solar Telescope, the DOT, the VTT, GREGOR and THEMIS, most of which are approaching the end-of life stage. These national observatories shall be decommissioned or reoriented to become test facilities for detector development or to educational programmes, and the research programme shall concentrate on the EST. Key elements of the landscape are the space missions, in particular the ESA Solar Orbiter programme to be launched in 2018, and the US Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST, formally the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope ATST), currently being built in Hawaii. DKIST is an asymmetric telescope with an observation programme concentrated on the Sun’s corona and linked with space missions.

EST has the same diameter (4m) but it is symmetric and optimized to detect light polarization as it is mandatory for the study of the emergence of magnetic fields at the solar surface and transfer of magnetic and kinetic energy from subsurface layers to the solar atmosphere. A significant advance can be achieved by obtaining observations, of the lower/cooler part of the solar atmosphere, with greatly improved spatial and temporal resolutions. The behaviour of the solar atmosphere in response to the input of magnetic energy is then observable with space instrumentation. The combination of space and ground-based instrumentation will allow a throughout comprehension of the solar magnetic dynamics.