Two LEON reports are published

Project LEON, led by our Tutorial Fellow in Biology, Professor Joe Bull, aims to enhance and facilitate finance for the benefit of nature by bridging data gaps and improving decision-making. LEON is funded by the European Space Agency and supported by many other partners.

Extensive technical work across the LEON pilots is nearing completion: value chains (mining, agri-food); physical and transition risks; biodiversity credits; natural capital accounting; debt-for-nature swaps.

The consortium of partners, working with ‘Early Adopter’ organisations, is in the process of producing some methods for employing earth observation observation (EO) data to facilitate nature finance mechanisms more effectively. This part of the work will conclude at the next project workshop in Copenhagen in June 2026.

Two LEON reports have been released, drawing upon the initial background research from 2025. The reports, led by Prof Nicola Ranger (LSE), explore different aspects on EO for scaling nature finance, concerning: (1) Opportunities, Enablers and Requirements; and (2) outcomes of an Early Adopter Survey.

The first report explores how:

• ️Nature finance markets are expanding, but constrained by data gaps.
• EO is widely recognised as a key enabling technology.
• Operational adoption of EO remains limited.
• ️The regulatory and policy landscape is evolving rapidly, with implications for nature finance and EO adoption.

The consortiuum suggests that, 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.

In the second reports, the surveyed organisations confirmed the above statements, saying that:

• Financial institutions increasingly recognise nature-related risks and opportunities.
• Regulatory drivers and financial innovation are key catalysts for nature finance.
• Lack of granular and standardised data remains the most significant barrier.
• EO data are widely recognised as a critical enabling technology.
• Medium spatial resolution and validated datasets are preferred.
• Supply chains represent a major frontier for EO-enabled nature finance.

Find out more about LEON on the project website.