Why EO Impact Assessment?

Earth Observations (EO), and geospatial information at large, offer a unique perspective for understanding our planet and addressing global challenges such as climate change adaptation, disaster risk management, and environmental degradation. EO‑based solutions have been developed to make more effective use of information and to support decision‑making, business actors, and society at large. As these challenges grow in complexity and the consequences of action or inaction become more critical for long‑term economic and social development, EO solutions cannot be developed in isolation. They must take responsibility for the context in which they operate. This requires a reciprocal relationship with society, where societal challenges shape the solutions, and solutions meaningfully respond to those challenges.

Impact assessment (IA) plays a key role in ensuring this. It provides credible evidence to societally relevant outcomes such as cost savings, productivity gains, employment, reduced risks, environmental protection, or other social benefits. In the context of public institutions, IA supports advocacy and accountability by helping justify investments, compare alternative options, and provide a robust and defensible basis for guiding future developments of EO systems and services. Moreover, the scope of IA increasingly serves as a two‑way learning process: on the one hand, it provides evidence of impacts; on the other, it offers structured feedback to EO data and service providers by highlighting strengths, gaps, evaluating risks and opportunities for improvement.

IA studies can be carried out at different levels and with varying depth, depending on the purpose of the analysis, available resources, and decision‑making needs. There is no single methodology that can capture the full range of impacts: methods are not mutually exclusive and are often combine quantitative and qualitative evidence. In the context of EO, some studies take a “top-down” perspective, operating at a macro level, such as national, regional, or sectoral scale, to capture broad, strategic impacts and situate EO within wider policy and investment frameworks. This is illustrated, for example, by the study assessing the benefits of the Copernicus Programme carried out for the European Commission (PwC, 2019). Other studies adopt a “bottom-up” approach, focusing on specific EO solutions and use cases along their full chain of value to provide more detailed and grounded evidence of how impacts materialise in practice. An example is the ESA-led, EU-funded Sentinel Benefits Study or the RFF and NASA-sponsored VALUABLES consortium. When considered together, these approaches help link strategic relevance with operational evidence, strengthening the robustness and credibility of EO impacts.

Although socio‑economic IA is still relatively new in the context of EO and space activities, a growing body of academically focused research exists that helps bridge EO practice with established socio‑economic disciplines. Rather than introducing a different notion of IA, this literature supports and strengthens the approaches described above by clarifying concepts, assumptions, and analytical choices. In particular, it shows how EO impact assessments can be informed by well‑established economic and socio‑economic methods already widely used in other sectors, while accounting for the specific characteristics of EO data, value chains, and users. This closer alignment helps improve the consistency, rigor, and interpretability of EO impact assessments, and supports the production of more robust and comparable results.

Overall, impact assessment provides a structured way to bring evidence together in a form that can be understood, discussed, and used. Beyond the analytical process itself, particular attention to how results are communicated is essential to ensure that findings are accessible and meaningful for different audiences and decision‑making contexts. By clearly articulating impacts and the reasoning behind them, impact assessment helps support learning, dialogue, and more informed choices over time.