Geospatial data and workflows for environmental and sustainability compliance reporting: including the private sector

Geospatial data and workflows are rapidly becoming central to environmental and sustainability compliance reporting, but the relationship between evolving EU regulation and available Earth Observation (EO) and GIS technologies remains poorly systematized. Focusing on the European Union and including the private sector, we review binding and soft-law instruments such as the CSRD and ESRS, the EU Taxonomy, the SFDR and the EUDR, and analyse which provisions require which type of spatial information for which business activities. Building on a structured scoping review of scientific and grey literature, we synthesise state-of-the-art EO and geospatial approaches that can operationalise these legal requirements, with a particular emphasis on deforestation-related supply-chain regulations. We propose a conceptual framework that distinguishes three families of geospatial workflows—risk screening, attribution and verification—and maps them to typical corporate reporting processes. Across the reviewed legislation and applications, we identify recurring gaps between legal definitions and EO-derived classifications, significant uncertainties in global land use/land cover products, and challenges in integrating geospatial data quality metadata into auditable reporting processes. At the same time, we highlight emerging opportunities from open EO archives, global benchmark products and AI-enabled processing platforms that can support scalable, transparent and repeatable geospatial workflows for sustainability reporting. The paper concludes by outlining a research and innovation agenda for standardised reference datasets, benchmarking protocols and interoperable platforms that jointly involve regulators, data providers and corporate users to ensure that geospatial workflows are fit for purpose in environmental and sustainability compliance reporting.