MARC GUNTHER
March 12, 2015
The forestry website Mongabay recently reported that United Cacao, a London-listed company that promises to produce ethical, sustainable chocolate, had “quietly cut down more than 2,000 hectares of primary, closed-canopy rainforest ” in the Peruvian Amazon. The company claimed that the land had been previously cleared, but satellite images showed otherwise.
The satellite images came from an online platform called Global Forest Watch, which provides reliable and up-to-date data on forests worldwide, along with the ability to track changes to forest cover over time.
Launched a year ago by the World Resources Institute (WRI), the platform has brought an unprecedented degree of transparency to the problem of deforestation, pointing to ways in which big data, cloud computing and crowdsourcing can help attack other tough sustainability problems.
Before Global Forest Watch came along, actionable information about forest trends was scarce. “In most places, we knew very little about what was happening to forests,” said Nigel Sizer, the global director of the forests programme at WRI. “By the time you published a report, the basic data on forest cover and concessions was going to be years out of date.”
Several technology revolutions have changed that. Cheap storage of data, powerful cloud computing, Internet connectivity in remote places and free access to U.S. government satellite images have all made Global Forest Watch possible. None were widely available even a decade ago.
Governments and NGOs are both using Global Forest Watch, as are companies like Unilever, Asia Pulp, and Paper and Wilmar, all of which have made commitments to stop deforestation.
An ambitious undertaking, Global Forest Watch brought together a broad coalition of NGO, corporate and government partners. Working closely with WRI are more than 60 partners, including Google (which supported the software development and provides computing power), ESRI (a privately-held mapping company), the University of Maryland’s department of geographical sciences (home to mapping and land-use expert Matt Hansen), Brazil-based Imazon, the Center for Global Development (a Washington DC-based think tank), and the UN Environment Programme. The multimillion dollar programme is funded by governments like Norway, the U.S. and U.K.
Google provides computing power, storage and software engineering, according to Rebecca Moore, the engineering manager for Google Earth Engine. Ms Moore and other Google engineers, in a collaboration led by Maryland’s Matt Hansen, built the world’s first high-resolution map of global forests, which was published in the journal Science in 2013 and became part of Global Forest Watch.
Global Forest Watch updates its data and images frequently — daily in the case of fire alerts; every few weeks otherwise. Satellite images track tree cover loss or gain at a 30-metre resolution for the entire world, and to a finer resolution in key spots.
Since the launch, governments, companies, nonprofits and individuals have layered on additional, valuable information. The governments of Indonesia and some central African nations, for example, have made data about land ownership and regulations governing forest use available. The platform also allows users to upload and share information. For example, local NGOs have recently posted stories about threats to caribou habitat in Canada and forests being harvested for charcoal in Cambodia.
Sustainability issues
Meanwhile, it’s easy to imagine how the technology behind Global Forest Watch could help deal with other sustainability issues. Already, several NGOs working in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are using satellite imagine and predictive analytics to assist park rangers who are trying to halt an unprecedented slaughter of elephants for ivory in Garamba National Park. Oceans could be monitored to track illegal fishing, or a map or database of the world’s factories could allow labourers to provide feedback on working conditions. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2015
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