New Markets

Our pioneering work on Spatial Finance is showcasing the Catapult’s unrivalled expertise whilst opening up business opportunities for UK space sector enterprises.

Spatial Finance

It has been a productive year. The Catapult launched its global asset-level databases for the cement and steel industries, work that will inform climate decisions and new environmental research. This project was part of the Spatial Finance Initiative, in collaboration with Oxford University and Alan Turing Institute, and the data has been downloaded 454 times between the launch in July 2021 until the end of July 2022; from across the finance and geospatial industries, not-for-profits, academics and others. It will inform insurers’ climate risk assessments, corporate decarbonisation strategies and benchmarking to penalise polluting businesses. The next step will be creating open datasets for other high-impact industries.

We also launched our first State and Trends of Spatial Finance report to generate demand for geospatial services from the financial sector. It was picked up by specialist media, and we were also invited to present to 90 staff at Bank of America. The databases and report were both launched at an event that provided a stage for UK startups and larger businesses (Sust Global, Naturemetrics, TransitionZero, GHGSat, Acclimatise/ WTW) to showcase their products and capabilities to an audience of 440 delegates.

Contributing to the BEIS consultation on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures was a great opportunity to demonstrate the value of geospatial and EO datasets; we are engaging with the City of London Corporation and the Financial Conduct Authority; and our market expertise is being increasingly recognised by the geospatial sector. An example is our work with Ordnance Survey around commercial opportunities in the sustainable finance market. The Catapult is also well placed to take advantage of increasing interest in robust monitoring of carbon offsetting.