A vehicle is driven along a flooded road after the overtopping of the River Thames on a spring tide, in west London, Britain November 7, 2025. REUTERS/Toby Melville
A BRITISH real estate manager overseeing €26bil (US$30bil) in assets and concerned about flood, fire and other climate-related risks to its properties sought help from Climate X, a data analytics firm based in London.
Climate X started crunching numbers and using its artificial intelligence (AI) risk modelling tool, informed partly by US scientific data, to help Savills Investment Management estimate possible damages to 300 of its assets in Europe and Asia if weather disruptions hit.
Savills said the information helps with investment decisions and it may now use Climate X analytics to assess hundreds more properties.
US President Donald Trump’s administration has been slashing spending for science services at a time of surging demand for analytics due to escalating climate change and extreme weather.
That is helping to drive a data industry boom for private data companies like Climate X that are providing everything from drought or pollution risk assessments to locations for untapped mineral reserves.
Revenues for the earth intelligence sector should rise at least 10% to US$4.2bil by 2030, market analysis firm Gartner said, teasing the industry in July as a “new revenue growth opportunity”.
The industry’s impact could be even more significant.
The World Economic Forum has estimated earth intelligence will help reduce risk, grow opportunities and generate jobs for a total US$3.8 trillion in economic value by 2030, up from US$266bil today.
The private data boom is also raising questions around accuracy and access for those unable to pay.
Private companies can do only so much without baseline data from US government agencies such as NOAA, according to officials from more than a dozen firms who spoke with Reuters.
“Without it we wouldn’t know if our models are good or bad, frankly,” Climate X co-founder and chief operating officer Kamil Kluza said.
With US datasets for climate-related information like methane plumes or flood maps possibly vanishing from the public sphere, Kluza’s company plans to lean on alternatives from the European Union, Japan and UK Met Office.
“We are huge consumers of governmental data to validate what’s happened in the past,” Kluza told Reuters.
“The governments hold the past flood history...past subsidence incidents, landslides and so on.”
Gartner predicts private companies will soon account for more than half of global spending on data services, up from just 15% currently.
The shift reflects both the private sector enthusiasm as well as downsized US support for science. Executives said that private companies in the sector have never found it easier to raise capital.
In 2025, earth intelligence companies raised some US$3.2bil across 57 funding rounds up to Nov 21, up sharply from US$1.1bil in 89 rounds last year and US$845mil in 99 rounds in 2023, according to data from industry tracker Tracxn shared exclusively with Reuters.
Montreal-based GHGSat, the largest provider of methane data, raised US$47mil in September through convertible notes and debt. It now plans to add two more satellites to its constellation of 13 already in orbit.
“Business is good, business is growing,” the company’s UK head Dan Wicks said.
GHGSat is part of a trend in private satellite monitoring, with 666 commercial satellites focused on earth observation or science circling the planet in 2023, compared with just seven in 2005, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.
With governments and energy companies looking for GHGSat’s help in spotting leaky infrastructure they can plug to stem climate-warming methane emissions and possibly boost profits, Wicks said, “we are seeing significant growth year-on-year as a private company”.
Public companies are also rallying. Shares for one of the largest, Planet Labs, are up 190% since January.
In the seven decades since Dutch-based Fugro began studying soil, it has grown into a geospatial data company with annual revenues above US$2.2bil as it took on marine surveys and pushed its mapping out to sea.
“We map, then we start modeling it, and then we start monitoring it – whether it’s the built environment or the natural environment,” Fugro chief executive officer Mark Heine said.
Two-thirds of its work is now offshore: building underwater maps that can help governments manage coastal environments or help ships navigate safely. — Reuters
Katy Daigle and Simon Jessop write for Reuters. The views expressed here are the writers’ own.
