Objectives of the service
Regulators, investors, auditors, and corporates face a common challenge: verifying environmental claims is prohibitively manual, time-intensive, expensive, and relies heavily on self-reported data. This creates significant exposure to greenwashing risk, particularly as regulations like the EU Green Claims Directive and Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive demand evidence-based substantiation of environmental statements.
The service provides automated, satellite-verified validation of corporate environmental claims in land-intensive sectors including mining, oil and gas, agriculture, and renewable energy. By combining Earth Observation imagery from the Copernicus programme with artificial intelligence-driven natural language processing, the platform extracts verifiable claims from corporate disclosures, maps them to physical asset locations, and independently assesses whether satellite evidence supports or contradicts the stated outcomes.
Users receive verification status, confidence scores, supporting satellite imagery, and detailed reports through an interactive web dashboard and application programming interface. This replaces slow, resource-heavy manual verification with a scalable, cost-effective solution offering 60-80% cost reduction compared to traditional site audits.
This activity delivers a working prototype demonstrating end-to-end claim verification, validates commercial demand across target customer segments, and advances the technology from prototype stage to operational demonstration readiness.
Users and their needs
Target User Communities
The service targets five primary user communities in the environmental, social, and governance verification space:
Government Regulatory Bodies (Competition authorities, environment agencies, Green Claims enforcement bodies) requiring evidence for anti-greenwashing enforcement actions.
Institutional Investors and Asset Managers (pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, ESG-focused firms) conducting due diligence on portfolio company environmental claims.
ESG Compliance Auditors and Consultants (Big Four firms, specialist ESG consultancies) seeking scalable verification tools to enhance assurance services.
Environmental NGOs and Advocacy Groups (watchdog organisations, transparency campaigners) monitoring and challenging corporate greenwashing.
Corporate Sustainability Teams in land-intensive sectors (mining, oil and gas, agriculture, renewables) verifying their own claims before public disclosure.
User Needs:
Independent, objective verification not reliant on corporate self-reporting
Scalable, automated monitoring across multiple companies
Cost-effective alternative to expensive manual site audits
Historical analysis capability for past claims verification
Defensible satellite evidence for regulatory or legal proceedings
User-friendly interface accessible to non-technical users
Key Challenges:
Achieving 85%+ claim extraction accuracy from varied corporate disclosure formats
Managing cloud cover limitations in tropical regions using radar imagery
Ensuring verification outputs meet diverse regulatory reporting requirements across jurisdictions
Service/ system concept
Capabilities and Information Delivered
The service provides users with verification status for corporate environmental claims (verified, unverified, or inconclusive), confidence scores reflecting data quality, supporting satellite imagery evidence, and natural-language explanations of findings. Users access results through an interactive web dashboard featuring map-based visualisation with before-and-after satellite imagery, time-sliders for viewing changes over months or years, and filtering tools to search across companies, sectors, and claim types. Reports can be exported, and enterprise users can integrate verification data into their own systems through a programming interface.
How the System Works
The platform reads corporate sustainability reports and uses artificial intelligence to identify environmental claims about land changes, such as mine rehabilitation or reforestation commitments. It then matches these claims to physical site locations using a database of over 75,000 industrial assets with geographic coordinates. The system automatically retrieves satellite images of that location from before and after the claimed activity, analyses changes in vegetation and land cover, and determines whether the satellite evidence supports the company's statement.
System Architecture
The cloud-based system connects three data sources: European Copernicus satellite imagery, corporate disclosure documents, and a physical asset location database. Processing flows through claim extraction, geographic matching, satellite image retrieval, change detection analysis, and finally delivers results via web dashboard and data interface.
Space Added Value
Space Assets Used
The service utilises two complementary satellite constellations from the European Copernicus programme. Sentinel-2 provides optical imagery at 10-metre resolution with 2-5 day revisit frequency, enabling vegetation index calculations and visual land cover classification. Sentinel-1 provides radar imagery that penetrates cloud cover, ensuring continuous monitoring capability in tropical and high-rainfall regions where optical imagery is frequently obscured.
Added Value of Space Assets
Satellite data delivers distinct advantages over current verification methods. Existing approaches rely on corporate self-reporting, expensive on-site audits costing €50,000 or more, or infrequent third-party assessments. These methods are easily manipulated, prohibitively costly to scale, and provide only periodic snapshots rather than continuous monitoring.
Satellites offer independent, objective evidence not provided by the companies being assessed. The high revisit frequency enables historical analysis going back over a decade, allowing verification of past claims and ongoing compliance tracking. Global coverage means remote sites across different continents can be monitored without deploying field teams.
Competitors such as commercial imagery providers focus on selling raw data rather than integrated verification services. Environmental monitoring platforms track broad trends but do not connect findings to specific corporate claims. The service uniquely combines AI-driven claim extraction with automated satellite verification, delivering 60-80% cost reduction compared to traditional audits.
Current Status
Achievements: Compiled test dataset of 10 companies with verifiable environmental claims. Completed initial prompt engineering achieving 78% claim extraction accuracy. Built working prototype demonstrating core functionality including claim extraction, satellite image processing, and basic user interface. Successfully processed 5 test cases through the Earth Observation verification pipeline. Secured Grieg Investor as strategic partner and external service provider. Obtained 2 pilot commitments from institutional investors and 3 NGOs ready for beta testing. Conducted needs assessments with 15 prospects and built pipeline of 50+ potential customers across all target segments.
In Progress: Refining AI extraction accuracy from 78% toward 85% target. Developing automated verification report generator. Building interactive map visualisation and claims dashboard interface. Creating test infrastructure with ground truth validation datasets.
About to Start: Proof-of-concept demonstrations scheduled with 5 prospects. Full end-to-end prototype testing on 20+ real-world cases. Preparation for paid pilot phase with 5-10 customers planned for Q1 2026.
Prime Contractor(s)
