Article by Akis Karagiannis: “Earth Observation is far easier to access than it was a decade ago. Data once handled by a narrow set of agencies and specialist teams now circulate through open archives, cloud platforms, browser tools, and shared analytical environments. Those changes have widened entry, lowered some technical barriers, and made new forms of scrutiny possible. Yet public use still fails for more ordinary administrative reasons. Monitoring programmes lose continuity, workflows never become a stable part of institutional operations, and technically available services sit idle when budgets tighten, procurement stalls, staff move on, or no organisation takes responsibility after release. Availability is only one condition of public use. On its own, it secures very little.
Part of the confusion lies in treating openness as a single condition. A sensing asset produces data. An access regime determines who can use them and on what terms. An operational layer turns them into alerts, maps, and monitoring outputs. Organisational uptake relies on ministries, agencies, NGOs, journalists, or community groups having authority, staff, methods, and routines for repeated use. Some arrangements add a further public-facing layer that keeps information available and inspectable across institutions and publics. Each part breaks down differently, and each draws on its own mix of budgets, contracts, stewardship, and administrative effort. An arrangement can look open on paper and remain thin in practice.
Markets can sustain some parts of this landscape. Firms will pay for bespoke analytics, tasking priority, premium delivery, or sector-specific products when the gains are direct and excludable. Public-facing uses are harder to fund that way. Regulatory oversight, early warning, environmental monitoring, and accountability produce benefits that spill across agencies and sectors, often appearing as avoided harm, better timing, or stronger scrutiny rather than revenue to a single buyer. Those gains are real, but they are difficult to capture through individual transactions. Public procurement and anchor demand therefore shape markets in ways private demand rarely will on its own.
That distinction helps separate cases often grouped together under the heading of openness. Carbon Mapper, MethaneSAT, and FireSat involve monitoring capabilities whose social return is easier to defend than to monetise. NICFI centres on purchased access to imagery already in orbit. SERVIR and Digital Earth Africa show what uptake requires inside institutions and regions. Global Forest Watch serves a different function, keeping shared evidence available across journalists, public agencies, NGOs, and researchers who would otherwise work from more fragmented ground. The economics of openness change at each point…(More)”.
