The socio-economic benefits of Earth Observation: measurement methods and challenges ahead

Abstract:

Over the past few years, the ability to gather information on different physical, chemical and biological characteristics of planet earth through remote sensing technologies has rapidly improved, bringing several benefits to the society. These benefits relate both to global issues, such as climate change and air pollution monitoring and local ones such as precision farming, urbanisation and transport infrastructures management. Although the increasing number of applications of satellite data in different fields, nowadays, none common methodology to evaluate such benefits has been identified by the space sector or economists. This study provides an overview of the current and potential way to measure the socio-economic benefits of Earth Observations. After reviewing the most popular methodological approaches used in the space sector grey literature, this paper proposes a Cost-Benefit Analysis approach, adopting the framework used to evaluate the benefits of large Research Infrastructures. This framework consists in estimating the welfare effects on different types of satellite data users, following cost-benefit analysis techniques that have been already used to estimate the socio-economic benefits of large research projects such as the Large Hadron Collider of CERN.