Opportunities, Enablers and Requirements in Advancing Earth Observation for Scaling Nature Finance

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 2 of this Preprint. You must log in to post a comment. There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 2 of this Preprint. Add a Comment You must log in to post a comment. Comments There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. The Leveraging Earth Observation for Nature Finance (LEON) project, supported by the European Space Agency (ESA), seeks to transform the use of Earth Observation (EO) data in enabling, mobilising and scaling nature-positive finance globally. This report builds upon six months of structured research, landscape analysis and multi-stakeholder engagement to map the opportunities and requirements for EO data within financial decision-making. It establishes the conceptual and operational foundation for the LEON project and its six thematic pilots. The findings of this baseline analysis suggest that EO could become foundational infrastructure for nature finance, enabling financial markets to integrate environmental intelligence into economic decision-making. Realising this potential will require several enabling steps: development of standardised EO-derived environmental indicators aligned with disclosure frameworks; improved asset-level geolocation data linking companies, projects and ecosystems; integration of EO datasets into financial analytics platforms and risk management tools; strengthened interoperability with sustainability reporting standards and taxonomies; and, expanded capacity building across financial institutions, regulators and data providers. If these challenges can be addressed, EO technologies have the potential to play a central role in enabling the transparency, accountability and scalability required to mobilise nature-positive finance globally. https://doi.org/10.32942/X29Q2D Life Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences Published: 2026-04-29 16:40 CC-By Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Language: English