EO/GI users in construction include construction companies, civil engineering consultancies, architect and design companies, planning authorities, and national land agencies.
They benefit from EO through monitor building development, assess environmental impact of human activities, map and assess flooding, detect land movement, subsidence, heave, and monitor land-use statistics
EO/GI users in insurance and real estate include primary insurance companies, re-insurance sector, insurance brokers, insurance service suppliers, commercial banks, major projects, and international financial institutions.
Production processes (including primary production like farming), property and real estate are often insured against certain risks, e.g. from natural hazards.
Users benefit from EO information through applications that monitor building development, assess crop damage due to storms (including to forecast and map large waves), assess damage from earthquakes, detect and monitor wildfires, map and assess flooding, detect land movement, subsidence, heave, forecast and assess landslides.
EO is capable to monitor topography with various types of land surface elevation data (both digital terrain models and digital surface models) and also focus on land surface changes and ground deformation / movement due to e.g. soil erosion or permafrost thawing, frost heaving. This includes also the mapping of stable zones where such changes do not happen. The main ways of creating a digital elevation model (DEM) from EO data are deriving it from interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR), from stereoscopic pairs of optical images acquired from different viewing angles, and deriving them via laser scanning.