Dr Genevieve Patenaude is an environmental scientist, entrepreneur, and climate technology leader specialising in Earth observation, biodiversity, carbon accounting, and environmental intelligence.
She is the CEO and Founder of Earth Blox, an environmental intelligence company that translates nature and climate data into insights for business decision-making for global businesses, financial institutions, and energy companies.
Prior to founding Earth Blox, Genevieve was an Associate Professor in the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh, where she led interdisciplinary research programmes that used Earth observation, AI, and planetary-scale data to address global environmental challenges.
Her academic and research career has focused heavily on understanding how environmental change, biodiversity loss, and deforestation affect ecosystems, climate systems, and human well-being. She has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals, including Nature, and has secured more than £14 million in research funding across climate, biodiversity, and environmental monitoring initiatives.
Genevieve contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Good Practice Guidance for Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry — one of the foundational international frameworks informing carbon accounting, forest monitoring, and greenhouse gas reporting. Her work helped support globally recognised approaches for measuring and reporting land-use emissions and carbon impacts using Earth observation and environmental data.
Genevieve has long been recognised for her ability to connect environmental science with strategic business decision-making. More than a decade ago, before nature and climate risk became mainstream corporate concerns, she warned that organisations were underprepared for the scale and complexity of environmental change.
Writing in the journal Nature in 2010, Genevieve highlighted that the managerial challenges created by global environmental change were only “moderately addressed” in business education, despite the growing influence corporations were having on planetary systems. She argued that environmental disruption could become as transformational for business as globalisation and the information technology revolution.
Her work identified an emerging reality that is now reshaping industries worldwide: organisations would increasingly need environmental intelligence integrated directly into strategic and financial decision-making. She also recognised early that advances in satellite technology, field data collection, drones, and large-scale analytics would fundamentally change how environmental impact is measured, monitored, and managed.
This systems-level perspective continues to shape Earth Blox today, where Genevieve focuses on helping organisations operationalise nature and climate intelligence at scale.
Alongside her academic work, Genevieve has built and led multiple environmental technology ventures. She co-founded Carbomap, a company specialising in forest mapping using remote sensing technologies, before launching Earth Blox in 2019 to make Earth observation and environmental intelligence more accessible and actionable for organisations worldwide.
Her entrepreneurial work has received significant recognition, including a Royal Society of Edinburgh Enterprise Fellowship, the Scottish EDGE Award, and the Converge Challenge Award. Earth Blox has also been recognised through programmes including Google Earth Engine, Tech Nation Net Zero, and Google for Startups.
Today, Genevieve focuses on helping organisations bridge the gap between environmental science and business strategy — enabling better decisions around climate resilience, biodiversity, supply chains, natural capital, and sustainability transition planning.
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