The social value of Earth observation: A new evaluation framework for public high-tech infrastructures

•This paper discusses and addresses the main challenges of evaluating the socio-economic impact of high-tech public infrastructures using Earth observations (EO).•The EO infrastructure employs an array of cutting-edge technologies that ultimately contribute to understanding, analysing and managing different natural and societal aspects of Earth with a tremendous socio-economic impact on current and future generations. However, this impact is challenging to understand and quantify.•This paper reviews the current fragmented literature on the socio-economic impact of high-tech infrastructure and builds on a new stream of studies on the cost–benefit analysis of large-scale research science-based infrastructures and on investing in the space economy.•This new evaluation framework estimates EO infrastructures’ benefits from the perspective of different types of social agents, directly or indirectly involved, along the value chain.•The framework can be adapted to estimate the socio-economic returns of other high-tech infrastructure investments.