Earth Observation Emerges as Most Valuable Asset of Nature Finance

Editor’s Note: Space Comm Expo is in the books for 2025. Some important things were said there, though, that better fit April, and Earth Day in particular. At OT, we held off on publishing the following until the world’s attention was in the right place.

Nature Finance Needs Space Tech

Earth observation and satellite tech are the keys to nature financing, say finance and academic experts in the sustainability data sector at this year’s Space-Comm Expo at the Space for Nature and Finance seminar.

The post-carbon world, our future is built upon the demandsof a top-down suite of guarantees about climate risks, which require sophisticated systems that are also simple enough for traditional industries to adopt.

“Companies really want to understand the impacts a site is having on nature,” Sebastian Leape, CEO of NatCap explained to delegates and press. “To understand the materiality of that impact, you have to understand the scope, the scale, and the irremediability of a given impact, to then decide whether it will be material or not.”

Satellites tasked with tracking environmental criteria have evolved from novel demonstrators into risk-mitigating regulatory workhorses and essential disaster warning systems.

“There is no more comprehensive means of monitoring our planet [than satellites],” explained Vanessa Bonnet Souleres, innovation manager, at Airbus at Paris Space Week last year. “[Airbus] delivers that capability to thousands of companies globally.”

Airbus alone operates over 150 observation satellites monitoring the Earth, supplying scientists and governments with geospatial data only available from orbit, and remote industry with information for environmental reports. Over half of the variables we use for climate are delivered by satellite connectivity, according to the European Space Agency’s Copernicus satellite program, a data market that is seeing increasing demand as sustainability programs accelerate.

In the pre-Trump world, ESG fund managers and nature finance players were eager to build stronger bridges between the worlds of Earth observation technology and green finance

Defining the Threat

The trick to building stronger bridges between data acquisition and processing sectors like Earth observation and finance rests upon effectively arguing that climate risk is economic risk.

“The loss of biodiversity is a risk to our economy,” argued Dr. Mark Jwaideh, Nature Data & Analytics Risk Lead at the University of Oxford. “Our core challenge is between two numbers, the $7 trillion is the estimated global financial flows that are damaging or destroying nature, and the $200 billion of nature-positive activities supporting sustainable, restorative practice.”

Dr. Jwaideh and others at the seminar believed that orienting the economy around sustainable practice would take more detailed, ubiquitous and simplified datasets around environment risk, which help drive actionable solutions.

“Oxford has made significant progress testing three ecosystem services – surface water supply, groundwater supply, and water quality. We’re now turning our focus onto soil quality, flood protection, and pollination, and hope to have these evolved by the end of the month.”

These climate-forward solutions are often cited as the space industry’s saving grace whenever public ire over extravagant space tourism or space pollution is stoked in international news, alongside the fact that space launch represents a fraction of the carbon footprint of global shipping or commercial aviation.

Matthieu Derrey, space products sustainability manager at Airbus rejected this line of thinking, telling this writer in 2024 that experts aren’t yet fully aware of how the space industry affects our climate, and pointing out that a single geosynchronous satellite can produce 100,000s of tons of carbon over its lifetime.

“We at Airbus want to identify sustainability problems as early as possible and be part of the solution to do better, so we don’t get taken out of the competition for green tech markets.”

Nature finance investors learning to trust the data

Experts at Space-Comm drew attention to the vast sums of data flowing out of the satellite ecosystem and how much more money was going into new data acquisition from orbit.

“There are hundreds of terabytes of data being downloaded every single day,” explained Andy Bennett, Knowledge Transfer Manager of Space at Innovate UK Business Connect. “with more data than we know what to do with, channelling it into nature finance can start to solve real challenges to unlock a nature-positive future.”

Bennett went on to say that financial institutions and companies were eager to know how they can reinforce their trust in Earth observation data, since its newness and complexity make it challenging for institutions to base significant nature finance decisions on.

“Trust is a really hard part of these metrics,” agreed Jonathan Hendry, Chief Technology Officer at 4EI, a startup analysing Earth observation data. “It takes seconds for us to get a first glance, but when we dive into a project we use 250 different indicators that we lump into a portfolio of information which we can layer over a timeline, we can create really convincing arguments.”

Such reports can reduce or even remove the cost of expert fieldwork, which can save on all kinds of costs that influence nature finance, especially in consideration of remote locations.

“At kilometre resolutions, we can track these objectives like carbon and biodiversity offsetting, policy adherence and compliance, and methane and other air pollution events daily over massive stretches of land and sea.”

As a fellow EO startup executive, NatCap’s Leape agreed.

“Turning raw data into an impact materiality assessment, a dependency materiality assessment, and translating all that into physical and transition risks and quantifying them, can be invaluable,” he said. “These impacts and dependencies can predict increased insurance premiums from soil erosion, or the cost of disclosure because of enhanced environmental regulation of nearby protected areas.

A third startup executive, Thomas Fenal, Chief Technology Officer at Gentian had similar remarks, citing his company’s success in providing data to protect peatlands in Scotland where the government has set aside hundreds of millions to safeguard areas critical to nature.

“Not all groups are ready to pay for this data, but there’s momentum in this direction,” he admitted, having seen many companies eager to make use of free sources of satellite information as they came to understand its utility.

In 2023, Big Four accounting giant PwC estimated that $58 trillion – half the global economy – is dependent on nature. As the procession of natural disasters accelerates worldwide, routinely destroying assets of significant value, the argument that nature is mankind’s foundational risk exposure will only continue to gain ground.