By Francesco Orlando

The Shift

In 2024, the world witnessed another relentless wildfire season. California alone saw over a million acres burn, with the Park Fire, one of the largest of the year, scorching more than 400,000 acres and destroying hundreds of structures. Across North and South America, wildfires intensified, blanketing cities in smoke, triggering mass evacuations, and forcing power shut offs to prevent further ignitions. Air quality plummeted, businesses closed, and entire communities were thrown into chaos. The cost, in human lives, property damage, and disruption, was staggering.
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The damaging effects did not stop at the fire line. Grid operators had to shut off electricity to prevent equipment from sparking new fires. Insurers faced billions in payouts. Meanwhile, utilities were once again criticized for relying on outdated vegetation management practices. Field surveys, helicopter flyovers, and even paper-based maps are still part of the toolkit used in vegetation/fire/storm management, despite the fact that, above our heads, dozens of satellites are already scanning the Earth every day.

This disconnect is emblematic of a broader truth: we are navigating climate volatility with tools built for a more stable era. And yet, we have access to something far more powerful, Earth Observation (EO), the use of satellite and aerial imagery to monitor changes on the planet in near real time.

EO has long lived in the background, mostly used by scientists, governments, or the occasional startup. But that’s changing. The technology has matured. The data is better. The infrastructure is in orbit. And as the consequences of climate change become more immediate, the need for fast, independent, and scalable insight has never been clearer.

Why Now: The Stack Is Ready

With EO’s tech stack matured, EO has moved beyond the lab and into commercialisation.

The first big unlock was cost. It’s now 90% cheaper to launch a satellite than it was 10 years ago. Miniaturized hardware and rideshare launches have enabled dozens of companies to send up constellations at a fraction of the cost. Planet Labs images the entire Earth daily. ICEYE offers radar imagery that cuts through clouds and darkness. Spire tracks weather patterns with global coverage. These capabilities were science fiction a generation ago.

And satellites are only part of the story. Advances in drones, aerial surveillance, and LiDAR have expanded how we collect high-resolution, real-time environmental data—especially in areas where satellite coverage may be limited, or ground validation is needed. Together, these technologies make EO a layered, flexible system capable of supporting everything from precision agriculture to emergency response.

And then, most importantly, demand has arrived. Not just from public agencies, but also from markets that have real capital at stake, climate risk underwriting, carbon offset validation, sustainable supply chain management. EO is no longer just informative; it’s financially material.

What’s Driving Demand

The drivers of EO adoption are coming from every direction.

Climate resilience is first. As climate volatility increases, companies and governments alike are scrambling to map, monitor, and respond quickly to risks across assets, infrastructure, and populations, in order to make critical systems more resilient. From wildfire and flood modelling to vegetation management, EO gives them eyes where no human could reach. Utilities are a clear example; EO data is being used to improve the resilience and efficiency of grid infrastructure, supporting faster fault detection, better asset monitoring, and smarter prioritization of upgrades. The result: fewer outages, lower operational costs, and a stronger case for long-term grid reliability investments. EO enables not just risk mitigation, but smarter capital allocation across grid infrastructure.

Insurance is evolving in parallel. Parametric insurance products are increasingly built on EO data: rainfall, temperature, soil moisture, and vegetation loss. The ability to trigger payouts quickly and objectively changes the economics of coverage in hard-to-insure regions.

Carbon and nature markets are another strong pull. Monitoring, reporting, and verification are the backbone of carbon markets. Without credible measurement, there’s no trust. EO offers a scalable, third-party lens on reforestation, avoided deforestation, soil carbon, and beyond.

Then there’s regulation; we’re entering an era of enforced accountability. EO becomes a neutral, scalable way to validate nature-related claims, particularly when those claims sit across fragmented or high-risk geographies.

Supply chain visibility is the final piece. Whether it’s monitoring illegal deforestation in sourcing regions or forecasting agricultural yields to manage food security, EO is increasingly embedded in how companies see and manage their physical footprint.

Applications Are Going Vertical

A key trend in EO right now is verticalization. The early wave of EO startups tried to be everything to everyone: data providers, analytics platforms, dashboard builders. That model is evolning into one where specialisation is key.

We’re seeing more targeted companies: EO for agriculture, EO for grid resilience, EO for biodiversity monitoring. For example, companies like Regrow and Sencrop are building tools for agricultural intelligence, Previsico and LiveEO are tackling flood and infrastructure risk, and NatureMetrics focuses on biodiversity monitoring through EO and eDNA data. These players aren’t just selling satellite data—they’re integrating it into workflows, translating it for domain experts, embedding it into financial decisions. They illustrate how EO is becoming not just a data source, but a critical operational layer for customers managing physical assets under climate stress. They’re opinionated, narrow, and closer to the pain point.

And this is where the ”soul” of EO really shows. It’s not about satellites anymore. It’s about trust, validation, and impact. When a farmer gets a payout because EO detected a drought early, or when a carbon credit is verified based on satellite biomass scans, or when a city avoids a flood because EO showed the storm surge path, that’s when the value becomes visible.

What’s coming

EO won’t remain a standalone category. It will become infrastructure, like cloud computing or GPS, invisible but everywhere. The most valuable EO companies won’t be the ones who just own pixels. They’ll be the ones who translate those pixels into insight, and those insights into action.

We expect the next phase to include:

• Hyperspectral imaging to detect pollutants, plant stress, or mineral signatures
• SAR expansion for around-the-clock monitoring of urban and remote areas
• Geospatial AI models that interpret EO data without needing a PhD
• Vertical-first platforms that embed EO directly into insurance, ag, forestry, mining, or infrastructure

As climate volatility increases, the cost of not having a live, verified, independent view of the planet will be too high to ignore. EO won’t solve climate change. But it will be one of the ways we make better, faster, and more accountable decisions in the face of it.

We see EO becoming a core enabler of climate adaptation and resilience — from wildfire detection to nature-based carbon verification. If you’re a founder building in this space, we’d love to connect. Whether you’re early or scaling, don’t hesitate to reach out — we’re always keen to learn more and support bold ideas.