Insights

What Saudi Arabia Teaches Us About Executing Climate & Infrastructure Innovation at Scale

January 26, 2026

Alain Gavin

Alain Gavin

Managing Partner - Chief Investment Officer

Saudi Arabia is becoming a real-world testbed for climate, water, and infrastructure resilience and it’s happening faster than most people realise.

In this short extract from Tech Command Investing, we shift focus to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and what practical deployment of advanced geospatial and thermal intelligence looks like on the ground.

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What stands out immediately is not just ambition but execution.

Through pilot projects in the Kingdom, we see how satellite-derived insights are being used to:
• Improve irrigation efficiency and combat desertification
• Quantify urban cooling impacts at city scale
• Measure outcomes ministries actually care about water saved, degrees cooled, productivity preserved
• Plan scalable interventions across regions such as NEOM and major urban centres

What’s striking is the mindset.

Decision-makers are accessible.

Pilots are encouraged.

Experiments are welcomed.

And when something works, it is executed - fast.

The conversation also highlights why urban heat is not a marginal issue.

Each degree of extreme heat above critical thresholds directly impacts human health and economic productivity.

At scale, this becomes a trillion-dollar problem globally and one that regions like Europe are already feeling acutely.

From cooling cities more intelligently, to monitoring roads, pipelines, refineries, and industrial assets from space, the discussion makes one thing clear:
🌍 Climate resilience, water security, and infrastructure monitoring are converging into a single strategic challenge.

🛰️ And space-based intelligence is becoming essential to managing it consistently, globally, and at scale.

▶️ Watch the short extract
This clip is an excerpt from the full Tech Command Investing episode 8, highlighting key insights from the discussion.
🎧 Want the complete conversation?
The full episode is available above on Tech Command Investing via Amazon Music, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and Audible.

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