Scope
Sustainability legislation is rapidly transforming the global business landscape. The European Union’s evolving regulatory framework—including the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), and the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR)—extends far beyond Europe’s borders. These frameworks increasingly require companies to provide spatially explicit, verifiable information about their supply chains and production areas.
For the Global South, these developments present both compliance challenges and opportunities. While large corporations can meet monitoring obligations, smallholders and producer cooperatives may struggle to provide the required data. However, the EUDR explicitly protects smallholders and opens new business opportunities for them by providing deforestation-free production (see European Commission ‘EUDR Myth Buster’, 2024; EUObserver, 2024). This workshop/special session aims to explore how Earth Observation (EO) and geospatial workflows can support fair, inclusive, and scientifically robust sustainability compliance, ensuring EO truly serves as ‘EO for Good’.
Building on recent research (Blaschke et al. under review, Geospatial Data and Workflows for Environmental and Sustainability Compliance Reporting), this session or workshop will cover:
1. Sustainability legislation and spatial data needs – Mapping and verification under EUDR, CSRD, and CSDDD.
2. Earth Observation for sustainability compliance – Integrating Sentinel, Landsat, and AI-based EO data for sustainability workflows.
3. Global South perspectives – Inclusion of smallholders, opportunities for capacity building and technology transfer.
4. Operational geospatial workflows – Open data and reproducible methods linking EO to sustainability reporting and innovation.
Organizers
Thomas Blaschke, University of Salzburg (Z_GIS), Austria – thomas.blaschke@plus.ac.at
Anton Eitzinger, International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), Colombia – anton.eitzinger@gmail.com