#66: Earth Observation for Climate Intelligence - Dr Benjamin Laken, Cervest

TerraWatch Space Podcast

Today, I am speaking with Dr Benjamin Laken, who is the Chief Science Officer at Cervest, a UK-based startup building a climate intelligence platform to support climate adaptation efforts for enterprises, governments and non-profits.
Climate risk is an important topic and satellite data has a lot to offer for estimating it. Whether it is the climate risk for an individual, an asset, an infrastructure or even an entire city, understanding the probabilities of scenarios is becoming more and more important. As Cervest is a company that is specifically focused on tracking, quantifying and reporting climate risk, I thought it would be great to speak to someone who is involved in building this important tool.
In this episode, Benjamin and I discuss Cervest and what the company is building, what their tech stack looks like, what type of satellite data they use, the challenges of using EO data, the hardest risk to measure and monitor, what the EO sector can do better, and more.

• Cervest Website
• EarthScan, by Cervest

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01:17: Intro

03:23: Cervest: Overview

05:38: What are assets and what are the risks (hint: physical, transition and natural capital?

12:58: What does the tech stack look like?

17:06: Who are the customers? And what is the product portfolio?

25:31: What type of EO data is used?

29:41: The hardest risk to measure and monitor

33:06: Challenges of using EO

36:45: Outlook on publishing research and peer-reviewing methodologies

40:05: State of EO and what the industry can do better

50:07: Differentiation with other datasets

53:13: Wrap-up