Climate crises, humanitarian emergencies and sustainable development challenges are deeply connected and increasingly complex. Whether it is prolonged droughts disrupting food systems or increasingly frequent floods displacing communities, governments and institutions require more robust tools to better anticipate, understand, and act on the overlapping risks. Satellite Earth Observation (EO) offers a strategic asset and plays a key role in aiding decision-makers with faster, data-informed responses, providing consistent, wide-scale, and timely environmental insights.
This article explores how EO supports development objectives, via two parallel mechanisms:
- ‘Direct benefits’ – informing decisions across sustainable development domains.
- ‘Indirect benefits’ – growth of space-related data economies, digital innovation ecosystems, entrepreneurship, and job creation. Notably, jobs are at the core of the World Bank Group’s approach to development.
Navigating the overlap between climate action, humanitarian assistance, and sustainable development
Rather than treating climate action, humanitarian response, and development as separate challenges, EO-based approaches help actors connect the dots, enabling data-informed decisions that work across sectors and timelines. Improved decision-making in these areas can have important ramifications, for example, using data to understand climate risks helps communities prepare for and recover from climate-related disasters. The same data can help humanitarian organisations to provide more timely response to disasters and support those populations that may be displaced by extreme weather events.
However, those challenges are all interconnected: climate events are causing more humanitarian crises, pushing more people into poverty, which makes sustainable development even more essential to build stronger and more resilient communities. For example, when a severe drought hits, it quickly creates food shortages that need urgent humanitarian assistance. But drought isn’t just an immediate crisis. It also highlights deeper, long-term issues like poor land management or climate instability.
Therefore, addressing food insecurity effectively means not only responding quickly with humanitarian assistance, but also investing in sustainable agriculture and strategies that build lasting resilience. These short-term emergencies and long-term sustainable development challenges are closely linked, and governments require data to understand and adequately address them.
Figure 1: Graphical Visualisation of the Interconnection between Climate, Humanitarian, and Development Challenges and Solutions
The ‘direct benefits’ of how Earth Observation addresses these global challenges
Satellite EO data is proving to be a powerful tool to address interconnected climate, humanitarian, and sustainable development challenges. By providing data for faster, and more informed decision-making, ensuring that responses are not only reactive, but also preventative and transformative. As highlighted via the Global Development Assistance (GDA) Midterm Evaluation and the Impact of Earth Observation for the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development reports, EO provides unique data that is global, frequent, timely, accurate, impartial, and cost-effective.
These characteristics allow it to inform critical decisions, providing direct benefits, to save costs, allocate resources strategically, and improve effectiveness of development cooperation programmes.
For example, in Indonesia, the ESA GDA programme, through its Disaster Resilience activity, provided EO-derived analyses and helped build local capacity on subsidence and flood risks. This work directly contributed to the ADB’s approval of a US$250 million loan through the UK-ASEAN Catalytic Green Finance Facility to strengthen flood management capacity. The project leveraged EO data to produce nationwide base maps, which significantly improved planning and operational response to flood risks. This illustrates how EO supports disaster risk reduction by enabling more data-driven infrastructure design and resilience planning.
Figure 2: Flood Frequency Map (2002-2021) of Jakarta. Contains modified Envisat and Sentinel-1 Data (2002-2021). Credit:: e-Drift–WASDI platform for ADB
Another example of EO’s direct benefits comes from the Sahel, where climate stress, resource scarcity, and social fragility often collide. As part of the “Water for Peace” initiative, the ESA GDA Water Resources activity is working with IFAD and local pastoralist networks to map groundwater availability across seven countries using satellite EO data. This information is used to guide the placement of shared water infrastructure, such as wells and solar-powered troughs, reducing conflict between farming and pastoralist communities. EO is helping to prevent crises before they escalate by identifying resource pressures early and guiding locally negotiated solutions, while also laying the groundwork for long-term development and peacebuilding in fragile, climate-affected regions.
Figure 3: Groundwater Storage Anomalies Across West Africa (2003–2024). This map visualises long-term groundwater storage trends across the Sahel region, supporting efforts to reduce water-related conflict between pastoralist and farming communities. Credit: GMV, through the ESA GDA AID Water Resources activity
Finally, EO is proving essential for anticipatory action in the face of climate-linked agricultural crises in East Africa. As part of the World Bank’s Emergency Locust Response Project, the ESA GDA Agriculture activity supported the development of satellite-based tools to track and forecast desert locust outbreaks across multiple countries. By mapping cropland damage and identifying breeding habitats with great accuracy, the initiative enables earlier and more targeted interventions, helping to safeguard food security in fragile, drought-prone regions. Importantly, the EO models can distinguish between damage caused by locusts and damage caused by drought, thereby reinforcing the value of EO for both humanitarian responses and long-term development planning.
Figure 4: Estimated Damage Done by Locusts to Cropland in 2020 for Ethiopia. The Map Shows the Main Damage Observed in Central Ethiopia, Tigray, and Amhara. Credit: VITO, through the ESA GDA AID Agriculture activity
The hidden ‘indirect benefits’ of Earth Observation for low- and middle-income countries
Beyond these direct benefits that are increasingly recognised, satellite EO also delivers a broader economic value and systemic impact of EO investment on local economies and technological capacity of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). In the ESA GDA-commissioned study Wider Economic Benefits from Satellite Earth Observation in Developing Countries by London Economics and Caribou, indirect benefits of a space-based data economy were highlighted: “EO activities generate wider benefits for developing countries, in terms of innovation, entrepreneurship, and job creation”.
These three indirect benefits (innovation, entrepreneurship and job creation) are closely connected. Innovation emerges when local actors gain access to the right data, infrastructure and training, which in turn creates the conditions for them to apply EO to local needs. This then stimulates entrepreneurship, with people starting companies around EO services and applications based on these new innovative approaches. As these new businesses grow, they generate new jobs, both directly in the EO sector and indirectly in the wider digital economy. Indeed, EO can lead to “digital spillovers”. These occur when capabilities developed for EO (such as advanced data processing, geospatial analytics, and resilient digital infrastructure) prove valuable across a wide range of sectors, supporting, for example, sustained investment in digital infrastructure. It has been estimated that the economic return from investments in digital infrastructure, for example EO-aligned infrastructure, is ~US$20 for every US$1 invested.
This is why International Financial Institutions such as the World Bank or the Asian Development Bank see EO as more than a technical tool. Supporting EO uptake can catalyse the emergence and growth of national digital economies, align with broader development financing goals (e.g., digital public goods, climate-smart infrastructure), help governments build institutional capabilities for data-informed governance, and accelerate job creation, which is increasingly considered a core aspect of IFIs’ approach to development.
With capacity building and skill transfer being key to generating innovation, entrepreneurship and job creation in LMICs, European initiatives have focused their efforts on providing the “baseline” for that by stimulating local capabilities, providing infrastructure, and creating institutional frameworks that allow these indirect benefits to take root. European and ESA-backed initiatives in Africa, Asia, and Latin America show how targeted support in training, infrastructure, and collaboration is strengthening innovation ecosystems, opening opportunities for entrepreneurship, and indirectly creating new jobs.
In Africa, the €100 million Africa–EU Space Partnership, under EU’s Global Gateway strategy, is strengthening the capabilities of Africa’s space industry, fostering a dynamic space-based data economy, and promoting innovation. The 2018 cooperation arrangement between the European Commission and the African Union Commission has also made Sentinel data directly accessible through high-bandwidth hubs, enabling researchers, startups, and governments to experiment with advanced EO datasets. ESA’s EO AFRICA initiative is an African-European R&D collaboration enabling an active research community and creative innovation processes for continuous development of EO capabilities in Africa. The R&D Facility is driven by African EO research challenges and issues annual research calls for addressing the most relevant ones. It is offering modern cloud computing & digital tools for the researchers and support a range of collaborative activities and initiatives between the African and European research communities.
In Asia, the National Copernicus Capacity Support Action Programme for the Philippines (CopPhil), a collaboration between the EU, ESA, and the Government of the Philippines, has combined local infrastructure investment with knowledge and capacity development through its Digital Campus. One recent achievement was a scholarship scheme allowing Filipino citizens to pursue EO and remote sensing degrees in Europe with full financial support. By returning with advanced technical skills, graduates contribute directly to innovation ecosystems, applying their expertise to design new solutions for local challenges. This not only spurs entrepreneurship by giving rise to home-grown EO companies but also expands the pool of skilled professionals available for national institutions, research centres, and private firms.
In the Latin America and Caribbean region, CopernicusLAC is establishing a regional Copernicus Centre in Panama, which supports the emergence of locally owned EO services by embedding Copernicus within regional innovation ecosystems. The 2025 CopernicusLAC Hackathon, run in multiple languages and free of charge, gave participants mentorship and access to global networks to turn ideas into applications. These activities build entrepreneurial capacity by lowering barriers to entry for innovators and startups, while the regional centre ensures that Copernicus capabilities are embedded locally, supporting long-term job creation through new service providers and strengthened national geospatial industries.
Recent GDA activities also show early signs of these longer-term, systemic benefits. For instance, the GDA Midterm Evaluation noted that several EO consortia are transitioning to open-source, service-based delivery models. These approaches promote reuse, localisation, and future adoption by national stakeholders. Cross-consortia collaboration is also enabling knowledge exchange, helping build institutional capacity and technical know-how that extend beyond the life of a single EO product or project.
Closing thoughts
ESA’s GDA programme, which operates at the nexus of EO technology and development finance, offers a unique opportunity to amplify both direct and indirect impacts.
As ESA GDA continues to expand its partnerships and engagements with IFIs, Global Climate and Environment Funds, and other actors in the broader development and impact finance community, clearly articulating and measuring the full spectrum of EO’s contribution to sustainable development will be essential for driving alignment, mobilising investment, and scaling adoption.
