From Orbit to Action: AI for Earthquake Response

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If disaster strikes, every second counts. Earthquakes strike without warning, causing sudden and widespread destruction to buildings, infrastructure, and essential services – endangering human life both directly and indirectly. Now everything needs to go quick – rapid damage assessment can guide rescue teams to the hardest-hit areas, and help anticipating potential further dangers in the area to help save lives when it matters most.

The context

Earth Observation (EO) plays a crucial part in delivering timely, accurate, and insightful information and rapid damage assessments, to aid rescue teams and disaster response personnel in their mission to save lives all around the globe. The International Charter: Space and Major Disasters provides rapid access to satellite data when disasters strike, enabling emergency responders to see the full scope of damage from space. By coordinating a complex network of space agencies and space system operators from around the world who work together to provide satellite imagery for disaster response purposes, the Charter delivers critical EO imagery to support rescue and recovery efforts within hours of an event. This timely, high-resolution data helps guide decisions on the ground – bringing clarity, speed, and coordination to crisis response.

ESA Φ-lab Challenges is proud to be teaming up with the International Charter: Space and Major Disasters to invite data scientists, AI researchers, students, geologists, and coders from all over the world to join the AI for Earthquake Response Challenge to build machine learning models capable of rapidly detecting post-earthquake building-level damage using EO data.

This global challenge is your opportunity to contribute to real-world humanitarian response – building AI tools that could be support deployment in disaster zones, saving lives and resources when every second counts.

🛰️ 🏙️ The Mission

In the wake of a major earthquake, speed and precision are critical. Satellite imagery offers an essential bird’s-eye view to detect actual and potential damage to infrastructure.

With this challenge, the ESA Φ-lab and the International Charter: Space and Major Disasters challenge you to to develop cutting-edge artificial intelligence models capable of rapidly detecting and mapping earthquake damage at the building level using high-resolution satellite imagery. In simple words, we task you with creating AI models that can automatically detect damaged vs. undamaged buildings from pre- and post-event imagery. By combining the powers of AI and EO, participants will help to optimise the way satellite imagery is used during and post disasters. This aims to bring greater speed, accuracy, and scalability to humanitarian response worldwide.

Join us in our Challenge, open from [START DATE] to 3rd October 2025.

💡The data

Of course you are not alone! The Charter and ESA Φ-lab will provide you with access to a vast archive of multi-mission, high-resolution EO data from previous Charter activations since 2021. Our comprehensive dataset includes a selection of pre- and post-event satellite imagery acquired from BlackSky Global, Gaofen-2, GeoEye-1, Kompsat-3, Kompsat-3A, Pléiades-1, Worldview-2, and Worldview-3 satellites. Our dataset provides you with high resolution calibrated optical EO data provided by multiple space agencies during Charter activations and processed by the ESA Charter Mapper platform.

For easy access, we are publishing the dataset on ESA’s Earth Observation Training Data Lab (EOTDL).*

*Pssst, some of the data we use is bound to access restrictions so please be mindful that we have to manually grant you access to the dataset. Be patient and don’t tell anyone else!

🏆The reward(s)

Winning models will be promoted in open-science forums, with the potential for integration into the ESA Charter Mapper, the cloud-based EO processing environment of the Charter. The integration of a successful model into the Charter ecosystem would offer international disaster management agencies a powerful new tool for real-time decision making during emergencies. On top of that, the three winning teams will win a cash prize of [DEFINE PRIZES].

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This is more than a competition. It’s a collaborative effort to advance science, technology, and humanitarian impact through space-based innovation. Together, let’s transform disaster response, one algorithm at a time.

📋 At a glance

Most likely we don’t have to tell you why you should join. But in any case, here’s why:

• 🚀 Make a tangible impact on disaster response and recovery
• 🔬 Collaborate with leading space and EO organizations
• 📡 Gain access to exclusive, high-quality satellite data
• 🌐 Get your work seen by space agencies, humanitarian organisations, and global stakeholders
• 💡 Push the boundaries of applied AI for good

So, just keep in mind the key dates:

• Challenge launch: 6th June 2025
• Submission deadline: 3rd October 2025
• Winner’s ceremony: 13th-17th October 13–17 2025 at the 54th Charter Meeting in Strasbourg

Whether you already have a team, want to look for new team members or want to tackle the challenge alone:

Join us now at [PLATFORM LINK GOES HERE] and help to contribute to the future of disaster response.

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