AXA, Munich Re Turn to Satellites to Tame Climate Risk

February is the culmination of cuffing season, a time when singletons look to make short-term partnerships to ride out the winter months and have someone to spend Valentine's Day with. 

But alliances of a very different kind have been made in recent months between insurers and Earth Observation (EO) companies — and these tie-ups are meant to outlast the spring thaw.

AXA Digital Commercial Platform (DCP) has been all-out polyamorous in this regard, having agreed strategic partnerships with not one but two leaders in the EO space: Planet Labs and ICEYE. The latter company also recently struck a deal with Munich Re, granting the German reinsurer’s Risk Management Partners unit access to its flood archive data and flood early warning suite. None of the three deals had their financial terms publicly disclosed.

Both ICEYE and Planet Labs command constellations of satellites that drink in data from the Earth’s surface and beam it back for government and commercial users, capabilities seen as essential to strengthening climate adaptation. Yet the full potential of EO imagery and the geospatial insights it enables remains largely untapped, held back by a widespread shortage of expertise in handling complex data.

What the AXA DCP and Munich Re deals reveal is a growing hunger from insurers for better, more timely data — to help clients prepare for disasters and adapt to mounting climate risks — and a recognition that EO is an indispensable source of it.

“It's an industry that’s exploding,” says Pierre du Rostu, CEO at AXA DCP. “And what we came to realize early in our journey was we can’t partner with just one entity. We need inputs from multiple providers for us to improve our understanding of risks.” His enthusiasm for the sector is validated by market research, which estimates it will grow around 7% a year to US$10bn by 2030, up from US$7bn today.

And it’s little wonder insurers are making these connections now. Global insured losses from natural catastrophes exceeded US$100bn in 2025 for the sixth consecutive year, piling pressure on carriers to optimize their pricing and management of climate risk.