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 Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence 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.
Legal firms with ESG, environmental law, and litigation practices embedding satellite-verified evidence into client engagements.
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, andfinally 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
The Kick-start activity has delivered a functioning proof-of-concept pipeline that extracts typed environmental claims from corporate disclosures, resolves them to physical asset locations via a graph of industrial sites, retrieves and processes Sentinel-1/2 and Landsat satellite imagery, detects site boundaries, and produces confidence-scored verification assessments with a fully interactive frontend. Claim extraction accuracy has reached 78% on a validated test set of 20+ corporate disclosures spanning mining, oil and gas, food manufacturing, and ecosystem restoration. All ten core system requirements have passed verification. Structured stakeholder engagement with senior institutional investors, ESG ratings professionals, and investment advisors have validated the value proposition, benchmarked module-level pricing as within market range, and surfaced engagement and stewardship of portfolio companies as a compelling near-term application. Grieg Investor has been retained throughout as a contracted External Service Provider, confirming the strategic value of the platform and committing to broker introductions to additional stewardship-active asset owners.
In Progress
Claim extraction accuracy is being refined toward the 85%+ target required for commercial launch, with error analysis from the initial test set identifying specific prompt engineering improvements underway. Methodology documentation is being drafted for regulatory review, covering the full analytical process per claim type in a format designed to satisfy the transparency and reproducibility conditions for EO evidence acceptance. The feasibility assumptions table and final review documentation are being updated to reflect Final Term findings, including the revised competitive analysis, legal admissibility analysis, and updated market sizing with both top-down and bottom-up methodologies. Partnership engagement with ESG data providers and Big 4 consultancies remains at an exploratory stage, with formal structuring deferred pending availability of the working MVP.
About to Start
The proposed ESA Pilot Project — the primary next step — will convert the proof-of-concept into a production-grade MVP, targeting deployment capable of handling concurrent users with full audit trail documentation. The pilot programme aims to engage 5–10 paying customers across institutional investor, regulatory, auditor, and NGO segments, with formal pilot commitments and Letters of
Interest positioned as Pilot Project deliverables rather than Kick-start outputs, consistent with the adoption gate senior stakeholders described during the activity. Regulatory validation will be pursued with at least one UK or EU regulatory body to secure formal acceptance of the satellite verification methodology for enforcement proceedings. Partnership integrations with 2–3 established ESG data providers will be initiated, activating the embedded distribution route identified as the fastest path to scale across multiple Final Term stakeholder engagements.
Prime Contractor(s)
