Data story: key signals in satellite & remote sensing for climate (angle 7)

By 2025, satellite-derived climate data now covers 94% of agricultural land in emerging markets—a threefold increase from 2019—yet only 23% of sustainability programs in these regions have successfully transitioned from pilot deployments to operational scale. This gap between technological availability and implementation maturity represents both the central challenge and the defining opportunity in climate-focused remote sensing for developing economies. As organizations across Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America race to deploy satellite monitoring for carbon verification, water security, and supply chain traceability, the distinction between success and failure increasingly hinges not on sensor resolution or algorithmic sophistication, but on the operational frameworks that bridge cutting-edge technology with ground-level realities.

Why It Matters

The urgency of satellite remote sensing in emerging markets stems from a confluence of regulatory pressure, climate vulnerability, and market opportunity. The European Union's Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), fully operational as of January 2026, now requires verified emissions data for imports from non-EU countries, directly impacting over $280 billion in annual trade flows from emerging economies. Simultaneously, the Global South faces disproportionate climate exposure: the World Bank estimates that by 2030, climate-related disruptions could push 132 million people in developing regions into extreme poverty, with water scarcity and agricultural volatility serving as primary drivers.

Satellite remote sensing addresses these intersecting pressures by providing scalable, cost-effective environmental monitoring where ground-based infrastructure remains sparse. The global Earth observation market reached $7.2 billion in 2024, with emerging market applications growing at 18.3% annually—nearly double the rate of developed economies. This acceleration reflects both technological democratization (commercial satellite imagery costs have fallen 85% since 2015) and institutional demand: the number of developing country governments with active satellite-based MRV (Measurement, Reporting, and Verification) programs increased from 34 in 2022 to 67 in 2025.

For sustainability leaders, the strategic imperative is clear. Organizations that establish robust satellite monitoring capabilities now will secure preferential access to carbon markets projected to reach $50 billion by 2030, while those relying solely on traditional verification methods face increasing compliance costs and market exclusion. The operational playbook for scaling these systems—particularly the lessons from Planet Labs' decade-long deployment across emerging markets—offers critical guidance for this transition.

Key Concepts

Satellite Remote Sensing for Climate: The acquisition of environmental data through sensors mounted on orbital platforms, encompassing multispectral imagery (visible and near-infrared wavelengths for vegetation analysis), synthetic aperture radar (SAR) for all-weather monitoring, and thermal infrared for surface temperature and water stress detection. Modern constellations achieve daily global coverage at 3-5 meter resolution, enabling near-real-time change detection across climate-relevant parameters.

Water Monitoring and Hydrological Sensing: Satellite-based assessment of surface water extent, groundwater depletion indicators, soil moisture content, and evapotranspiration rates. Microwave sensors penetrate cloud cover endemic to tropical regions, while gravity-based measurements from missions like GRACE-FO detect subsurface water changes. In emerging markets, where 40% of agricultural land lacks ground-based hydrological monitoring, satellite data often represents the only systematic water intelligence available.

Climate Resilience Mapping: The integration of multi-temporal satellite observations with climate models to identify vulnerability hotspots, assess adaptive capacity, and monitor resilience interventions. Key indicators include vegetation health trends, flood and drought exposure, and land-use change patterns. Resilience mapping increasingly informs climate finance allocation, with major development banks requiring satellite-verified impact metrics for adaptation investments exceeding $10 million.

Biomaterials and Land-Use Traceability: Satellite-enabled verification of sustainable sourcing claims across agricultural and forestry supply chains. This encompasses deforestation-free commodity certification, regenerative agriculture verification, and biomass quantification for bio-based materials. The EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), effective December 2024, mandates geolocation data and satellite-verifiable production boundaries for seven commodity categories, driving unprecedented demand for traceability infrastructure in producer countries.

Additionality Verification: The use of remote sensing to establish counterfactual baselines and confirm that claimed environmental benefits (particularly carbon sequestration) would not have occurred absent specific interventions. Satellite time-series analysis provides the historical context necessary to distinguish project impacts from natural variability or pre-existing trends, addressing a longstanding integrity challenge in voluntary carbon markets.

What's Working and What Isn't

What's Working

Hybrid Ground-Satellite Calibration Networks: Planet Labs' most successful emerging market deployments combine satellite imagery with strategically placed ground reference stations, typically at ratios of one calibration site per 50,000 hectares of monitored area. In their Indonesia palm oil traceability program, this hybrid approach achieved 97.3% accuracy in detecting deforestation events greater than 0.5 hectares within 72 hours—performance that pure satellite-based systems could not match due to persistent cloud cover during monsoon seasons. The ground network, operated through partnerships with local agricultural cooperatives, provides both radiometric calibration data and rapid field verification capacity.

Tiered Alert and Response Architectures: Successful implementations employ graduated response protocols matched to detection confidence levels. High-confidence alerts (typically >85% algorithmic certainty) trigger immediate stakeholder notification and field verification within 48 hours, while medium-confidence detections (60-85%) enter weekly review cycles with expanded contextual analysis. This tiered approach, pioneered by Global Forest Watch and now adopted across commercial platforms, reduces alert fatigue while maintaining rapid response for genuine events. In Brazil's Cerrado region, tiered protocols increased verified response rates from 31% to 78% between 2022 and 2024.

Embedded Capacity Building Models: Rather than delivering satellite analytics as external services, leading operators increasingly embed technical capacity within client organizations and national institutions. The European Space Agency's EO Africa initiative has trained over 2,400 African data scientists since 2020, while Planet Labs' Emerging Markets Fellowship program places full-time analysts within partner organizations for 18-month rotations. These embedded models address the critical skills gap that caused an estimated 45% of 2020-2022 pilot programs to fail upon external support withdrawal.

Interoperability with National Data Ecosystems: Successful scale-up requires integration with existing government data infrastructure, including cadastral systems, agricultural registries, and environmental permitting databases. In Vietnam, Planet Labs' partnership with the Ministry of Agriculture achieved 89% automation in forest monitoring report generation by connecting satellite-derived alerts directly to the national Forest Management Information System. This integration reduced verification lag from 23 days to 4 days while eliminating manual data entry errors.

What Isn't Working

Resolution Over Relevance Prioritization: Many emerging market deployments fail by optimizing for sensor specifications rather than decision-relevant outputs. Ultra-high-resolution (<1 meter) imagery, while technically impressive, often proves counterproductive when processing infrastructure cannot handle data volumes or when ground conditions make fine-scale interpretation unreliable. A 2024 assessment of 34 failed pilot programs found that 71% had specified resolution requirements exceeding operational needs, resulting in unsustainable data costs and processing bottlenecks.

Insufficient Attention to Land Tenure Complexity: Satellite monitoring systems designed for clear property boundaries struggle in contexts of customary land rights, overlapping claims, and informal tenure arrangements prevalent across emerging markets. In West Africa, an estimated 90% of agricultural land lacks formal registration, rendering polygon-based monitoring approaches operationally meaningless. Programs that attempted to impose cadastral frameworks as prerequisites for satellite monitoring consistently failed to achieve scale, while those adopting landscape-level or community-based monitoring units demonstrated greater success.

Underestimation of Connectivity Constraints: Despite declining costs, satellite data transmission and cloud-based analytics assume connectivity infrastructure that remains absent across large rural areas of emerging markets. Offline-capable systems, edge computing architectures, and asynchronous synchronization protocols remain underdeveloped relative to cloud-native solutions dominant in developed market deployments. Programs requiring real-time connectivity for core functions—rather than treating it as an enhancement—consistently underperformed in regions with <40% mobile broadband penetration.

Key Players

Established Leaders

Planet Labs PBC — Operating the world's largest commercial Earth observation constellation with over 200 satellites, Planet provides daily global imaging at 3-5 meter resolution. Their Planetary Variables product suite delivers analysis-ready climate indicators specifically designed for emerging market applications, including automated deforestation alerts and agricultural health indices.

Maxar Technologies — A leading provider of high-resolution optical imagery (up to 30 cm resolution), Maxar's SecureWatch platform powers government and commercial climate monitoring programs across 40+ emerging market countries. Their archive, spanning three decades, enables robust historical baseline establishment for carbon and land-use change verification.

Airbus Defence and Space — Operating the Pléiades and SPOT satellite constellations, Airbus provides both optical and radar imagery critical for all-weather monitoring in tropical regions. Their One Atlas platform offers standardized access to analysis-ready data products across emerging market geographies.

ICEYE — The Finnish company operates the world's largest synthetic aperture radar constellation, providing flood mapping and infrastructure monitoring capabilities unaffected by cloud cover or darkness. Their rapid-revisit SAR data has become essential for disaster response and water resource monitoring in monsoon-affected regions.

Satellogic — The Argentine company pioneered the concept of "remapping the Earth" through high-frequency, affordable multispectral and hyperspectral imaging. With manufacturing facilities in Latin America and strategic focus on emerging market clients, Satellogic offers regionally competitive pricing and localized support infrastructure.

Emerging Startups

Pixxel (India) — Building a constellation of hyperspectral satellites capable of detecting subtle biochemical signatures in vegetation, water, and soils. Their India-based manufacturing reduces costs while their climate-focused product development targets agricultural resilience and water quality monitoring in South and Southeast Asia.

SatSure (India) — Combining satellite imagery with AI analytics to deliver decision-ready insights for agriculture, infrastructure, and financial services sectors. Their platform processes multi-source satellite data into standardized risk scores, enabling credit assessment for smallholder farmers lacking traditional documentation.

Pachama (United States/Latin America) — Leveraging satellite imagery and LiDAR data to verify forest carbon projects with unprecedented accuracy. Their remote sensing-based verification has been adopted by major corporate buyers including Microsoft and Shopify, establishing new standards for carbon credit integrity in tropical forest regions.

Blue Sky Analytics (India) — Providing environmental intelligence APIs that translate raw satellite data into actionable air quality, fire risk, and land-use change indicators. Their developer-friendly platform enables integration of satellite-derived insights into downstream applications without requiring remote sensing expertise.

Sust Global (United States/Africa) — Specializing in physical climate risk quantification for emerging market infrastructure and agricultural assets. Their platform combines satellite observations with climate projections to deliver asset-level risk scores used by development finance institutions and insurers operating in vulnerable regions.

Key Investors & Funders

Google Ventures and Breakthrough Energy Ventures — Led Planet Labs' $280 million Series E and continue to fund climate-focused Earth observation startups, prioritizing solutions with demonstrated emerging market traction.

The Green Climate Fund (GCF) — The world's largest climate finance mechanism has allocated over $500 million since 2022 to programs with satellite-based MRV components, establishing remote sensing as a prerequisite for large-scale adaptation and mitigation investments.

British International Investment (BII) — The UK's development finance institution has made strategic investments in satellite analytics companies serving African markets, including a $35 million commitment to climate-smart agriculture platforms leveraging remote sensing.

Temasek Holdings — The Singaporean sovereign wealth fund has invested heavily in Southeast Asian agritech and climate resilience companies incorporating satellite data, including Series A and B rounds for multiple regional players.

The World Bank Forest Carbon Partnership Facility — Has provided over $150 million in technical assistance and results-based payments tied to satellite-verified emissions reductions from forests, establishing methodological standards now adopted across REDD+ programs globally.

Examples

1. Planet Labs' Indonesia Palm Oil Traceability Program (2021-2025): In partnership with the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and the Indonesian Ministry of Agriculture, Planet deployed a comprehensive monitoring system covering 14.7 million hectares of palm oil concessions and surrounding landscapes. The system processes 847 terabytes of satellite imagery annually through localized cloud infrastructure, reducing latency from initial detection to verified alert from 14 days to 53 hours. Since full deployment in 2023, the program has detected and verified 2,847 deforestation events totaling 18,400 hectares, enabling supply chain interventions that industry analysts estimate prevented an additional 31,000 hectares of conversion. Critically, the program embedded 23 Indonesian nationals in full-time analyst roles and established a training pipeline through Bogor Agricultural University, ensuring operational continuity independent of external support.

2. ICEYE Flood Response Network Across the Mekong Basin (2023-2025): Following catastrophic 2022 flooding that displaced 3.4 million people across Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, ICEYE established a regional flood monitoring consortium with the Mekong River Commission. The SAR-based system provides flood extent mapping within 3 hours of satellite overpass, regardless of cloud cover, enabling evacuation decisions previously dependent on delayed ground reports. During the 2024 monsoon season, the system issued 156 validated flood alerts across the four countries, with post-event analysis confirming that early warnings reduced economic losses by an estimated $340 million compared to baseline response capabilities. The consortium model, with shared costs and governance across national agencies, has since been replicated for drought monitoring in the Nile Basin.

3. Pachama's Carbon Verification Deployment in the Amazon Legal Region (2022-2025): Pachama's remote sensing-based verification platform now covers 12.3 million hectares across 47 forest carbon projects in Brazil, Peru, and Colombia. By combining Sentinel-2 optical imagery with LiDAR-derived canopy height models, their system quantifies carbon stock changes with ±8% accuracy—sufficient for verification purposes without ground sampling. This capability reduced verification costs from an average of $18 per hectare to $2.40 per hectare while decreasing verification cycle times from 18 months to 6 months. Corporate buyers representing $89 million in annual carbon credit purchases now require Pachama verification as a procurement condition, demonstrating how satellite-based integrity assurance has reshaped market expectations for emerging market forest projects.

Action Checklist

• Conduct a satellite data needs assessment that prioritizes decision requirements over technical specifications, explicitly matching monitoring parameters to organizational capacity and regulatory obligations.
• Establish ground calibration infrastructure covering at minimum one reference site per 50,000 hectares of priority monitoring area, partnering with local institutions for sustainable operation.
• Develop tiered alert protocols with defined confidence thresholds and response timelines, ensuring high-confidence alerts trigger action within 48 hours while managing alert volume for lower-confidence detections.
• Invest in embedded capacity building that places satellite analytics expertise within core organizational functions rather than maintaining external consultant dependencies.
• Integrate satellite monitoring outputs with existing national data systems, including cadastral databases, agricultural registries, and environmental permitting platforms where applicable.
• Design for connectivity constraints by implementing offline-capable processing, edge computing architectures, and asynchronous data synchronization suited to target region infrastructure realities.
• Adopt landscape-level or community-based monitoring units in contexts of informal land tenure, avoiding dependence on formal cadastral boundaries that may not reflect ground realities.
• Establish baseline data archives spanning minimum 5-7 years prior to intervention to enable robust additionality verification and counterfactual analysis for carbon and impact claims.
• Allocate 15-20% of satellite monitoring program budgets to localized training and knowledge transfer, measured through verified competency assessments rather than participation metrics alone.
• Develop multi-source data strategies combining optical, radar, and derived products to maintain monitoring continuity despite cloud cover, sensor outages, or seasonal limitations.

FAQ

Q: What is the minimum viable satellite monitoring deployment for an emerging market sustainability program? A: A minimum viable deployment typically requires access to medium-resolution imagery (10-30 meters, available free through Sentinel-2), a cloud-based processing platform capable of change detection (Google Earth Engine or equivalent), one trained analyst per 500,000 hectares of monitoring area, and at least three ground reference sites for calibration and validation. Initial annual costs range from $25,000 to $75,000 depending on monitoring intensity and geographic scope. Programs should expect 12-18 months to achieve operational reliability, with the first six months focused on baseline establishment and calibration rather than alert generation.

Q: How do satellite-based MRV systems address concerns about additionality in carbon markets? A: Satellite time-series analysis establishes historical baselines that demonstrate pre-project conditions and trajectory, enabling comparison between intervention areas and matched control sites. This counterfactual approach, when combined with statistical matching techniques that control for observable landscape characteristics, provides substantially stronger additionality evidence than project-level documentation alone. Leading verification standards including Verra and Gold Standard now accept satellite-derived baselines for specific project types, though ground-truthing requirements remain for carbon stock quantification in high-biomass ecosystems.

Q: What regulatory frameworks are driving satellite monitoring adoption in emerging markets? A: Three regulatory frameworks dominate current adoption drivers. The EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), effective December 2024, requires satellite-verifiable geolocation and deforestation-free verification for seven commodity categories imported to Europe. The EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), fully operational from January 2026, creates demand for emissions monitoring across industrial supply chains in exporting countries. Additionally, Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, operationalized through the Glasgow and Sharm el-Sheikh decisions, establishes satellite-based monitoring as a preferred approach for internationally transferred mitigation outcomes, directly influencing bilateral climate cooperation agreements.

Q: How should organizations evaluate satellite data providers for emerging market applications? A: Key evaluation criteria include demonstrated emerging market experience (minimum 3 years operational deployments in relevant geographies), local support infrastructure (in-region technical staff and training capacity), offline and low-bandwidth operational modes, pricing models appropriate for sustained multi-year programs rather than one-time analyses, and integration capabilities with national data systems. Organizations should request reference deployments at comparable scale and request performance metrics including detection accuracy rates, alert latency, and client retention statistics. Trial periods of 3-6 months with defined performance benchmarks are advisable before committing to multi-year agreements.

Q: What are the most common reasons satellite monitoring pilots fail to scale in emerging markets? A: Post-mortem analyses of failed programs identify five recurring factors: (1) specification of resolution requirements exceeding operational needs, creating unsustainable data costs; (2) assumption of connectivity infrastructure absent in target regions; (3) dependency on external technical support without embedded capacity building; (4) failure to integrate with existing institutional data systems and workflows; and (5) underestimation of the time required for baseline establishment and calibration before operational monitoring. Programs that address these factors during design—rather than attempting remediation during implementation—demonstrate substantially higher scale-up success rates.

Sources

• Planet Labs. (2025). Emerging Markets Impact Report 2024: Satellite Monitoring for Sustainable Supply Chains. Planet Labs PBC.

• World Bank Group. (2024). Climate Change and Development in Emerging Economies: The Role of Earth Observation. World Bank Climate Change Global Practice.

• European Commission. (2024). EU Deforestation Regulation: Implementation Guidance for Third Country Operators. Official Journal of the European Union.

• Global Forest Watch. (2025). Forest Monitoring Technology Assessment: Performance Benchmarks Across Tropical Regions. World Resources Institute.

• IPCC. (2024). Advances in Monitoring, Reporting and Verification for Climate Action. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Technical Paper.

• Verra. (2024). Remote Sensing Guidance for Jurisdictional and Nested REDD+ Programs. Verra Standard Document VM0048.

• McKinsey & Company. (2024). The State of Climate Tech 2024: Earth Observation and Satellite Analytics. McKinsey Sustainability Practice.