By Mina Wang, intern with the Just Earth Observation for Conservation (JEOC) project
Earth observation (EO) has long been used for environmental monitoring, but has become increasingly integral in recent years — not least in the Global South, where the promise of the bird’s eye view has been touted as a way to democratize access to environmental information and decision-support across the continents. Indeed, projects like the Guinea Land Cover Mapping initiative and the NASA-led SERVIR-Mekong initiative for reservoir and flood monitoring have shown how EO can effectively be used to support conservation goals and climate resilience. Similar to many other sectors, however, EO has experienced significant commercialization over the last decade or so: between 2014 and 2022, the share of commercial satellites amidst over 1,000 operational EO missions rose from just 10% to an estimated 71%. And the global EO industry is far from being leaderless: in 2024, companies based in the US and Europe alone accounted for over 85% of the market share.
While neoliberal institutions hail public-private cooperation as a means of democratizing EO solutions, the unequal distribution and use that can result risks deepening global and regional inequalities. Moreover, it risks creating situations where Global South countries, which are already experiencing the most dire effects of climate change, would fall into financial dependency on the Global North private sector to effectively mitigate and manage both disaster risk and biodiversity preservation. This issue grows more pressing as global geopolitical trends drive the rollback of development programs like USAID which have historically facilitated access to publicly funded datasets like NASA’s SERVIR. Yet despite their crucial role in expanding and restricting access to environmental EO in the Global South, research focusing specifically on the social justice impact of higher level EO value chain actors is sparse.
This is why I decided to look into the different modalities of public-private partnerships between Global North companies and Global South actors throughout my 8-week internship with the Global Development Institute’s Just Earth Observation for Conservation project. In the process, I conducted a semi-systematic search of materials published by five major commercial EO data providers in the environmental sphere—Airbus, Maxar, Planet, GHGSat, ICEYE —and their activities in the Global South. Using a follow-the-funding approach, I tried to identify which stakeholders (public, private, academic, or other) they were interacting with. From this, I sought to explore how different partnership types might influence the amount of agency actors in the Global South retained over what has on occasion been deemed the world’s most valuable resource: data.
Data ownership and North-South inequality
Commercial data has lowered the barrier of entry for many countries – through data subscriptions, countries lacking advanced space infrastructure may bypass the need for their own satellites. However, commercialization remains a double-edged sword. Outsourcing hardware components often means ultimately relinquishing data ownership, as data remains entrenched in tangible infrastructure like satellites, ground stations, and data centers. This carries with it an inherent risk of creating dependencies on Global North companies – all the more so if they are countries’ sole or primary source of EO data. The issue of data ownership may even extend to donor-funded programs, an example being Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative. While providing access to Planet Labs’ imagery of the global tropics during its runtime, access was revoked after its end in 2025 and a subscription fee introduced as the NICFI platform was repurposed by Planet Labs as the Tropical Forest Observatory. This is concerning in a field where financial unsustainability is a known hurdle for achieving long-term positive impact – one that might be mediated with continued access to public data.
These risks are not news to actors in the Global South, who have sought to address the issue of materiality in various ways. ISRO, India’s national space agency, recently announced the creation of a consortium of local EO companies to build a national EO constellation, with the explicit aim of ‘reduc[ing] dependence on foreign imagery’. Short of building a nationally owned EO program, other countries have turned to so-called ‘Space-as-a-Service’ and ‘Satellite-as-a-Service’ partnerships, which made up a large proportion of the case studies I encountered during my search through company materials. These services provide ridesharing for satellite payloads and the sale of finished satellites to governments in the Global South, offering an alternative to data subscriptions. Otherwise, the risk of dependence can be mitigated through the use of tip and cue systems, as in the case of the Brazil-based consortium MapBiomas Alerta, rather than fully relying on commercial data to sustain critical operations. These systems supplement low-resolution, open access data used in detection systems with high-res imagery bought from private companies. When a few meters per pixel can determine usability, the technological lead of private firms over governments becomes especially consequential.
Deepening regional inequality
Many of these solutions to the problem of ownership, however, feed into the second, more overarching issue, namely the risk of deepening regional inequality. The capital-intensive nature of spacefaring is the reason many countries engage with Global North companies in the first place. Hardware deals temper the benefits of data-based solutions, such as lower entry costs and the accessibility of analysis-ready data, as they require pre-existing infrastructure, funds, and human resources. The financial burden increases further when considering analytical technology and expertise must be present for data to become useful to decision-makers in any meaningful way. As such, it may come as no surprise that many of the deals highlighted in company publications I encountered involved the governments of Middle Income Countries (MICs) like Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa over LMICs which may lack the capacity or finance for such deals.
The potential risk extends beyond veteran companies. Given the increasing role of small satellite providers in bringing EO to the Global South, rising players like GHGSat and ICEYE—whose limited activities in the region are largely restricted to India and Brazil—may gravitate towards more mature markets, further widening the gap in regional capacities. While concentrated capacity development in local hotspots may have benefits for regional cooperation, it can also reflect uneven growth. It’s a known issue in public-private cooperation on infrastructure projects in developing countries that private investment tends to flow towards areas that are likely to generate the greatest returns, rather than those where it may be most urgently needed. It remains to be seen whether similar issues might arise in EO, as no wide scale reports or investigations have been released to directly track industry investment in the Global South.
Conclusion
Although commercialization has pushed the envelope of EO use in a few ways, it’s questionable whether it has truly ‘democratized’ access for actors across the entire Global South. Hardware deals and ridesharing programs have allowed nascent spacefaring nations like Angola, Chile, and Thailand to launch their own EO satellites and take control of their environmental data, but in doing so may promote uneven regional growth. Data deals can theoretically help countries with fewer resources gain access to EO data, though my research suggests that in reality they tend to supplement the national fleets of UMICs like Guyana, Kazakhstan, and Peru. Cross-sector consortium-style initiatives which use commercial data as one of several sources can help broaden access while minimizing dependency, though their effectiveness strongly depends on the distribution of power within them, the sources of funding, and the specific actors involved.
Despite the promises of universal access and philosophies of ‘space for all humankind’ spearheaded by public-private partnerships, as championed at the latest instalment of the UK Space Conference, issues of data ownership and access remain. An eight week internship gave me just enough time to skim the surface of these issues, but imposed some important restrictions. The prevalence of government contracts in the case studies I encountered may well be influenced by companies’ incentive to privilege high-profile deals in their self-published materials. The lack of publicly available revenue information for private companies, and the lack of clarity regarding the intended uses (environmental or intelligence) of EO data further complicates the picture. A deeper look into specifically environmentally-focused partnerships, and a more systematic analysis of the diversity of consortium-style arrangements could help illuminate the tangled underbrush of relations in the future.