Sustainability Of Space – Why a Space Leaderboard?

After many years creating digital space-enabled geospatial products that support environmental and social harms reduction, Andrew Iwanoczko founded Callala.  Callala represents an innovation consulting company with a clear mission: help space and geospatial-enabled companies deliver the measurement, reporting, and verification services that would ultimately underpin the delivery of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

As Callala worked with business leaders to drive organisational transformation using geospatial solutions, Andrew began to see a troubling paradox. The space sector, despite its crucial role in monitoring and addressing global challenges, was remarkably silent about its own sustainability impact.

The Carbon-Cost-Per-Pixel

Andrew's initial focus in 2022 was intensely practical: developing a carbon cost per pixel of satellite data as a new buyer metric. By comparing satellite data vendors on traditional product specifications, including spatial resolution, revisit rates, wavelengths, and swath width, Callala sought to drive responsible business practices by adding lifecycle carbon cost as a purchasing consideration.

The concept seemed straightforward, but those first conversations exposed the space sector's opacity. The widely accepted notion that small satellites were inherently more efficient than larger satellites in constellations came under scrutiny. Andrew found himself challenging industry orthodoxy, arguing that the data simply wasn't there to support these assumptions.

The gut feeling was that the European Copernicus missions, he reasoned: “with their constant imaging and centrally managed capture plans, these larger satellites might actually deliver greater imaging utilisation relative to their per-launch emissions over their operational lifetimes”.

Academic Partnerships and Research Foundations

The complexity of the challenge prompted Andrew to seek academic rigour. Partnering with Sixty7.Green and the University of Manchester in 2023, Callala embarked on a Sustainable Futures project: "From Launch to Business Insight: Developing a framework to assess the environmental cost of satellite data with consideration of technical, economic, and governance aspects".

This collaboration, aligned with the Earth and Space Sustainability Initiative (ESSI) and the Astra Carta, set the tone for a long-term vision of an environmentally sustainable space industry. The project highlighted the sector's environmental costs: from rare earth metal extraction to spacecraft manufacturing, from hydrogen fuel cells often derived from fossil fuels to the proliferation of small satellites creating space debris.

The undertaking additionally exposed some key knowledge gaps – including re-entry processes – i.e. the chemical reactions and environmental impact of materials burning up in the upper atmosphere remained poorly understood, adding to the sector's environmental ability to assess and respond to its harms.

The ESG Research Breakthrough

The academic foundation led to Callala's ground-breaking 2024 ESG for Space report “Responsible Business and Environmental, Social and Governance Reporting for the UK Space Sector”, which exposed a stark paradox through hard data.

Whilst the space sector champions its role in climate services and the "greater good", there is a disconnect. With 100% of the Sustainable Development Goals benefiting from space technologies and 50% of the world's climate variables only measurable by space, it was surprising only 13% of companies analysed provided public Sustainability Reports covering environmental and social commitments, and just 8% had publicly available accounts of their emissions impact. The limited reporting that did exist came almost exclusively from multinational corporations where space represented just one component of their broader business portfolio. This painted a picture of an industry that had largely opted out of the sustainability conversation.

This was despite the global space community being uniquely positioned to both monitor and address global environmental and social challenges, and despite the sector's impressive economic performance with the UK space industry outpacing global growth at 5.1% versus 1.6%.

The Collaborative Evolution

The research findings catalysed a new phase of collaboration and highlighted critical gaps in the industry: limited ESG integration where many companies treated sustainability initiatives as ancillary rather than strategic; insufficient transparency and standardised reporting on ESG metrics; and poor stakeholder engagement with local communities and affected parties.

Through 2024 to 2025, Callala and Sixty7.Green have continued to support a follow-on project: "Visions of, and steps towards, an Environmentally Sustainable Space Future" This initiative led by the University of Manchester aims to engage stakeholders in appraising the space industry's future whilst developing strategies to mitigate negative impacts and enhance benefits.

Working in parallel with ESSI standards development, the project focuses on forging a stronger, more resilient, and more profitable UK space sector through comprehensive sustainability integration.

The approach combined business strategy and leadership support, life cycle analysis (LCA), and stronger governance frameworks, thereby addressing the sector's challenges whilst capitalising on opportunities like the resilience of space capital investment and the UK's position as a key destination of global space investments.

The Index Innovation

In late 2024, Andrew and the Callala team took a decisive step forward. Rather than continuing to advocate for reporting in the abstract, they decided to create something concrete: a comprehensive space sustainability index and a published Space Leaderboard.

The index incorporates a sophisticated series of parameters and weightings that generated scores based on companies' sustainability credentials across multiple dimensions. However, an early challenge emerged: the index was almost entirely dependent on terrestrial-based ESG reporting, with only a handful of organisations addressing space-specific harms in their disclosures.

Companies were evaluated not only on how they operate to deliver against SDGs, but on their fundamental and publicly disclosed business practices: organisational structure and leadership, governance arrangements, environmental impacts, and social impacts – crucially, both positive and negative.

Yet the reality was that whilst many companies were signing up to space sustainability initiatives like the Astra Carta and ESSI frameworks, they largely lacked substantive discussion of what progress they were actually making against these commitments.

Methodology Reassessment and Evolution

The initial launch of the Space Leaderboard reveals a fundamental challenge that would drive the next phase of methodology development. Over the following months, the team at Callala began reassessing the methodology, recognising that good reporting in the space sector requires a more nuanced approach than simply adapting terrestrial sustainability frameworks.

The problem is largely clear.  Today, organisations can demonstrate strong performance on traditional ESG metrics such as carbon reporting, water usage, diversity policies, governance structures, yet remaining entirely closed about their space-specific environmental and social impacts.

The very issues that made the space sector unique, such as orbital debris creation, launch emissions, rare earth material extraction, end-of-life satellite disposal, were barely addressed in public reporting, even by companies that had publicly committed to space sustainability initiatives.

This realisation prompted a fundamental question – “what does good space sustainability reporting actually look like in practice, how should it be measured, and what can be practically achieved today with what is knowable about a company’s harms?”

The Leaderboard Launch & Learning

The result of this extensive development process is the Space Leaderboard by SustainabilityOf.Space - A first-of-a-kind ranking that identifies companies operating in specific countries or regions that demonstrate strong sustainability credentials, albeit with important caveats about the current state of space-specific reporting.

The inaugural Space Leaderboard focuses on the UK, showcasing the top 50 companies based on available public disclosures. However, the exercise revealed as much about the limitations of current reporting as it did about company performance. Most organisations that ranked highly did so primarily on the strength of their terrestrial ESG practices rather than comprehensive space sustainability reporting.

This represented both an achievement and a call to action – i.e. demonstrating that measurement was possible whilst highlighting the urgent need for the industry to develop more comprehensive, space-specific sustainability disclosure practices.

Looking Forward

What started as a quest to quantify the carbon cost of satellite pixels has evolved into a comprehensive framework for evaluating space sector sustainability, backed by rigorous academic research and multi-stakeholder collaboration. Yet the journey has also revealed the limitations of current approaches and the need for continued evolution.

Alongside measuring present-day performance, the Space Leaderboard exposes the gap between space sustainability aspirations and actual reporting practices. Whilst companies readily sign up to sustainability initiatives, the challenge now is to move beyond commitments to meaningful, measurable progress reporting on space-specific impacts.

The ongoing methodology reassessment reflects a commitment to developing more sophisticated measures of what good space sustainability reporting looks like in practice. With an evolving methodology, the SustainabilityOf.Space Space Leaderboard, companies have a snapshot-in-time and a pathway for demonstrable organisational improvement to responsible business best practice.

Callala - Responsible Business and Environmental, Social and Governance Reporting for the .

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*Graphic Design: Victoria Beall