Supporting Nature-Positive Projects with Space Technology
What is Nature Finance? Nature Finance places nature at the heart of financial decision-making. It is the flow of financial mechanisms, investments and strategies to...
Executive Summary
The rapid loss of biodiversity poses significant risks to the UK, affecting food security, water resources, climate stability and the wider economy. Nature finance is becoming essential for directing investment toward protecting and restoring ecosystems, and Earth Observation (EO) is increasingly important for providing trusted environmental intelligence. Despite advances in capability, adoption of EO remains slow due to regulatory uncertainty, data quality issues, access barriers and limited user readiness. The Satellite Applications Catapult, through the Nature Capital and Traceability intervention, aims to address these challenges by coordinating action across the sector, supporting UK space companies to grow in the nature finance market, convening cross‑sector collaboration, promoting the use of space‑based technologies in policy and finance, and collaborating with UK space companies on demonstrator projects that build trust and unlock the full potential of EO for nature intelligence.
Introduction
The accelerating loss of biodiversity presents a significant risk to the UK’s long‑term security, as the degradation of major ecosystems threatens food supplies, water availability, climate regulation and global supply chains. These cascading impacts include economic instability, rising food prices, migration pressures, conflict over natural resources and increased disease risk, as highlighted in the UK Government’s recent national security assessment. In response, governments worldwide are taking action. The UK has committed to restoring 30 percent of land and sea by 2030, both through leadership by Defra and through legislation such as Biodiversity Net Gain.
Nature finance has emerged as a critical mechanism for directing investment toward the protection and restoration of ecosystems. It uses financial instruments such as green bonds, biodiversity credits, conservation funds and blended finance to channel public and private capital into nature‑positive activities. To support this, monitoring experts increasingly rely on satellite‑enabled Earth Observation, which offers scalable and credible environmental intelligence. Rapid advances in machine learning, computing power and new sensor types are expanding EO capabilities. As the nature finance market grows, the UK space sector faces both challenges and opportunities, driving the need for a shared roadmap that will help unlock EO’s full potential for nature finance nationally and internationally.
Case Study: Map Impact
Map Impact are directly addressing nature and climate risk compliance in financial services and real estate. Using satellite Earth Observation data, property-specific mapping products have been created for heat, drought and wildfire susceptibility which are significantly more detailed than any competitor. These are all underpinned by an understanding of landcover, habitats and biodiversity, providing clear evidence of the climate-nature nexus.
The occurrence and cost of wildfires is increasing globally, with recent examples across the Mediterranean, UK and Los Angeles. Understanding susceptibility is critical to insurers, lenders, developers and homeowners. Susceptibility will continue to increase over the 30-year tenure of most mortgage portfolios, so risk of occurrence is already embedded and getting worse. The need to recognise the risk at a granular level (and price it) has been extensively documented by bank regulators with changing expectations (e.g. PRA in UK, California Insurance Commissioner in USA and ECB in EU).
Map Impact have created UK-wide data products which are being adopted within banks, insurers, government and infrastructure organisations in the UK, as regulatory demand for climate risk reporting increases. Coupled to this is the increasing need to consider adaptation and resilience. Using a data driven approach, customers can use Map Impact’s products to support nature-based solutions and interventions at a local, regional and national level to mitigate the effects of climate change.
Challenges and Recommendations
Over the last year, the Satellite Applications Catapult engaged with actors across the nature finance and EO sectors to understand these challenges and to frame how it can support the UK space sector, and its EO companies, to respond to the market.
Demand for and the scale of nature finance and therefore nature-related reporting are increasing. Earth Observation has huge potential to help meet this demand. Its adoption remains uneven and is not happening at the required pace. Through our engagements with a range of stakeholders, it is becoming clear that several barriers exist in the widespread adoption of EO data for the mapping and monitoring of ecosystems. These barriers are systemic within the nature finance sector, as well as technical. These can be broadly split into five categories:
Regulatory and Governance Uncertainty
+Challenges
Regulatory requirements for reporting nature-related risks, dependencies and opportunities (e.g. TFND, ISSB, EU standards) are still evolving. Organisations struggle to understand what may constitute “decision-grade” EO data, how to evidence methodologies, and how to ensure auditability. This uncertainty delays investment and inhibits the development of fit-for-purpose EO solutions.
Way Forward
- Engage proactively with regulators and standards bodies to shape and anticipate reporting requirements
- Develop guidance frameworks for organisations that translate regulatory expectations into practical EO data specifications
- Establish transparency and auditability standards that allow EO providers to protect IP whilst enabling end-users to demonstrate methodological rigour
Data Availability, Quality, and Standards
+Challenges
There is a shortage of ready-to-use EO-derived datasets tailored specifically to nature finance and biodiversity monitoring. Field and in-situ data are essential for calibration and validation but are often collected inconsistently, often as a by-product of research funding and with no common standards. Citizen science efforts vary in quality and large infrastructure projects face data-sharing constraints due to ownership and privacy concerns.
Way Forward
- Co-develop standardised data specifications for field, EO, and hybrid datasets, aligned with end-user needs
- Encourage the creation of open “for nature” datasets to support testing, innovation, and procurement
- Promote data-sharing mechanisms that balance privacy and security needs with public good, including incentives for landowners and infrastructure operators
- Established shared metadata and interoperability frameworks to improve data discovery and integration
Access, Licensing, and Commercial Models
+Challenges
EO data remains difficult to access due to opaque pricing, restrictive licensing, and inconsistent terms across providers. Organisations often cannot assess return on investment or determine whether a dataset can be reused across projects. Limited access to sample datasets further raises the barrier to entry.
Way Forward
- Develop transparent, standardised licensing models, such as “buy one, use many times”, to reduce procurement friction
- Create clearer intellectual property and data-commercialisation guidelines to support responsible reuse
- Encourage pre-competitive data pools or shared procurement models to reduce costs and increase uptake
Technical Barriers in EO Processing and Integration
+Challenges
EO processing pipelines are often “black boxes”, particularly among start-ups protecting proprietary methods. This limits auditability and trust, especially for financial disclosures. Organisations also face challenges with data storage, cloud costs, and selecting appropriate EO products. High-resolution datasets require significant storage and computing capacity, and processing methods vary widely across providers.
Way Forward
- Develop reporting standards that allow providers to maintain IP while enabling end-users to demonstrate transparency
- Promote cloud-native, efficient data architectures, and compression techniques to reduce storage burdens
- Provide procurement guidance and decision-support tools to help users select appropriate EO products
- Encourage open documentation of processing assumptions and uncertainty quantification
Skills, Communication, and User Readiness
+Challenges
The EO and geospatial workforce is skewed towards technical skills (e.g. Python, machine learning) with less emphasis on cartography, visualisation and storytelling – skills essential for communicating insights to non-technical decision makers. Conversely, many nature-finance stakeholders lack EO literacy making it difficult to interpret outputs or integrate them into decision-making.
Way Forward
- Expand training programmes that combine EO, ecology, data-visualisation and user-centred design
- Build cross-disciplinary capacity between EO specialists and nature finance practitioners
- Promote best-practice visualisation standards to ensure insights are interpretable, actionable and aligned with user needs
Addressing these challenges requires a collaborative effort, within and beyond the space sector, to establish standards, improve data management practices, increase end user comfort with EO data, and promote transparency and accessibility in EO data.
Next Steps
As a world-leading research and service economy, the UK is uniquely positioned to establish itself as the nature finance capital of the world.
The vision of the Natural Capital & Traceability intervention within the Resilient Earth Mission at Satellite Applications Catapult is to position space as an indispensable tool in enabling nature intelligence for finance and supply chain assurance. Addressing the challenges listed above is directly aligned with the intervention’s vision, therefore the Catapult will actively lead and participate in activities related to this.
Our focus is on addressing two system-level blockers:
- De-risking private investment in nature restoration
- Providing auditable, transparent and certifiable data for nature-related disclosures
There is a need for coordinated action, and our engagement with both end users and UK space companies directly reflect these priorities. The Catapult is uniquely positioned to tackle these blockers and the challenges outlined in this paper by:
- Supporting those companies within the UK space sector with the ambition to grow and scale in the nature finance market.
- Convening cross-sector roundtables and working groups to align stakeholders and accelerate collaboration.
- Championing the adoption of space-based technologies for nature intelligence in policy, finance and regulatory contexts.
- Driving uptake of EO in response to new and emerging nature-related regulations; and,
- Delivering projects that prove the technology, build trust in its outputs, and demonstrate real-world value.
We invite partners from across sectors to join us in this effort, to help scale solutions, strengthen market confidence, and unlock the full potential of space for nature intelligence for finance.
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