According to the Swiss Re's sigma report published in March 2026, in 2025 natural catastrophes cost the world a record 100 billion US dollars for the sixth consecutive year.
The Swiss Re's sigma report analyses data around economic loss since 1970. Their analysis found that over 80% of the rise in climate-related losses comes down to one thing: more valuable assets being built in increasingly hazardous areas. As the climate is changing, the biggest challenge is that many critical infrastructures have historically been expanding into environments that are increasingly difficult to monitor and, in many cases, in areas that already presented hazards long before the first brick was laid, but were invisible at the time of field inspections.
In large part, nowadays organisations are still managing those assets the same way they did a decade ago: through scheduled inspections on a fixed cycle, or by sending field teams out periodically and responding to whatever issue inbetween inspections. Until recently, traditional methods were the gold standard; today, we now know that there are more efficient and cost-saving technologies.
Climate volatility has shortened the interval at which conditions on the ground can change, but it is not a problem of weather only, it is also how well maintained infrastructure is under the ever-changing conditions.
This has become even more important as climate change accelerates the pace at which conditions shift. Historical data alone can no longer be relied upon in isolation to anticipate what comes next. This is where satellite analytics add real value, by monitoring the same areas at regular intervals and picking up emerging trends before they become problems.
It is estimated that about 40% of Europe's energy infrastructure is older than 40 years. And according to the European Commission, the EU needs at least €584 billion in grid investment by 2030 and €400 billion for electricity distribution and €184 billion for long-distance transmission.
For example, a vegetation corridor that looked stable in March may be interfering with a power line by July. A road that showed no signs of stress in last year's survey may have shifted after an unusually wet winter and at the same time, the cost of missing these changes is now higher.
The good news is that the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) has documented how satellite observations are now considered vital tools for wildfire detection and monitoring across Europe.
A reactive approach to asset management means responding to problems after they occur. So, for example, a power line goes down, a road collapses after a wet winter; a pipeline corridor is breached without warning. The incident triggers the response. Proactive intelligence gives organisations a continuous picture of conditions across their asset network, detecting changes as they develop so that risks can be assessed and addressed before they become failures. Proactive intelligence requires a lot of data.
Most large organisations already have more data than they can process; however, the ability to turn that data into something a decision-maker can quickly act on is often the missing piece. And it is often why these organisations turn to companies developing satellite-based geo-analytics solutions.
What changes with satellite-based geo-analytics is the combination of three things that, historically, could not be achieved together:
Scale: A single satellite pass can cover hundreds or thousands of kilometres of infrastructure in one acquisition. What would take weeks of field survey can be processed and delivered as structured analysis within days.
Continuity: Rather than point-in-time snapshots, change detection across time periods reveals trends that no single inspection would catch, for example a gradual slope movement or an encroachment in power lines in progression.
Integration: Raw satellite data alone is not intelligence. When EO data is fused with environmental datasets, historical incident records, and operational context, and delivered through the systems your teams already use, it becomes something an asset manager can act on directly without requiring GIS expertise or a remote sensing background.
The shift, in short, is from inspection-driven records to continuous, evidence-backed intelligence.
At Earthpulse, we have deployed this combination across energy, water, and transport infrastructure in Europe and beyond. Working with operators and institutions including Telefónica, Abertis, and the World Bank, our team has built solutions that monitor vegetation encroachment on power line corridors, detect early signs of ground movement near critical assets, and track water network conditions, delivering structured intelligence to teams who need to act, not analyse raw data.
Take a utilities operator managing thousands of kilometres of electricity lines across varied terrain. Under a traditional model, hazardous vegetation removal is scheduled by geography and historical cycle, meaning field crews are dispatched on rotation regardless of whether there is any active risk at that location, while genuine hazards elsewhere go undetected until the next scheduled visit. This is a challenge Earthpulse has worked on directly while monitoring vegetation corridors along power line networks to identify interference risk continuously, so that maintenance resources are directed where the risk is real.
With geo-analytics, large portions of a network can be monitored continuously for encroachment risk, with signals ranked by severity and location, reducing the need for blanket field surveys without replacing the human judgement required to act on what the data reveals.
The underlying change is the same: geo-analytics can bring companies from a reactive approach that accepts gaps in visibility, to a proactive approach that uses continuous intelligence as the baseline.
The organisations setting the pace in infrastructure and asset management are asking how to integrate that satellite intelligence into the decisions they make every day. That transition is what marks the shift from reactive to proactive.
For asset managers, the question is no longer whether this approach is viable. It is how quickly it can become the standard.
Earthpulse helps organisations move from reactive to proactive asset management by turning Earth Observation data into continuous, structured geo-analytics. Through our solutions, infrastructure and risk teams get a consistent picture of conditions across their asset network updated regularly, integrated into existing workflows, that require no GIS expertise. Get in touch to see it in action.