Sergio Estella
Sergio Estella is a designer and entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience working at the intersection of data, technology, and environmental impact. He is the co-founder of Vizzuality, a European company that designs digital platforms to make complex scientific data accessible and actionable.
His work focuses on translating Earth Observation data, environmental models, and large-scale datasets into tools that support decision-making across climate, nature, and sustainability challenges. Sergio has led the design of platforms that help detect forest loss, monitor supply chains, map illegal fishing, and explore climate futures.
He has collaborated with organisations such as the United Nations, the World Resources Institute, the World Bank, the European Space Agency, and leading academic institutions, including Cambridge, Stanford, and Yale, helping turn scientific knowledge into operational tools with real-world impact.
Sessions
The way we monitor soils, water resources, and agricultural landscapes has been transformed by Earth Observation and environmental modelling over the last few years. Nevertheless, real decision-making remains a major challenge, as turning complex datasets into tools is not yet trivial for human purposes.
In this talk, the audience will learn about lessons learned from designing platforms such as Soils Revealed, Aqueduct, Foodscapes, and Landgriffon. These tools combine satellite indicators, global environmental datasets, and workflows to help users better understand soil degradation, water risks, and food system dynamics, and to translate environmental data into platforms that support decision-making across scales, from regional planning to global analysis.
We will also reflect on the challenges of moving from data to decision tools, combining scientific outputs with user needs, based on human-centered design to support exploration and comparison, and ensuring that complex environmental information is both scientifically rigorous and accessible. By combining Earth observation, modelling and interface design, these platforms demonstrate that environmental data is trustful acctionable knowledge to help inform land and water management.