Seeing and Stopping Deforestation from Space with MapBiomas

The Scale of Amazon Deforestation

• 🎯 In the last 12 months, nearly 20 trees were cut down every second in the Amazon.
• ⚠️ Brazil, a country named after a tree, is the fifth-largest greenhouse gas emitter, with 75% of its emissions coming from land use, primarily deforestation.
• 🌳 Tropical forests act as the Earth's lungs, storing carbon and maintaining the planet's cooling system through evapotranspiration.
• 🌍 In 2024, countries with large tropical forests lost an area equivalent to Rwanda, converting forests to pasture, croplands, urban areas, and mining, alongside degradation from logging, droughts, and wildfires.

Mapping Deforestation with MapBiomas

• 🛰️ Global satellite technology provides images, but understanding land-use transformations requires context and time-series analysis.
• 💡 MapBiomas reinvents map production by creating mosaics of satellite images since 1985 and applying machine-learning algorithms to classify pixels into land-use classes.
• ⏳ This process generates integrated maps for each year, creating a "time machine" to view the history of 30x30 meter pixels over four decades.

Accountability and Impact

• 🚗 Similar to traffic cameras issuing penalties, MapBiomas uses high-resolution imagery to validate deforestation events, cross-referencing with land registries and protected areas.
• 📊 This enables the production of detailed reports, leading to a significant increase in environmental agency actions against illegal deforestation, from less than 1,000 reports annually to 2,000 per week.
• 💰 Major banks have denied $1.5 billion in finance to farms with detected deforestation, redirecting funds to more sustainable operations.
• ✅ Brazil has decreased Amazon deforestation by 54% in the last two years, saving 500 million tons of CO2 emissions.

Broader Applications and Future Vision

• 📈 Over 600,000 users access MapBiomas data for diverse applications, including preventing tropical diseases, regulating water use, assessing climate impacts, and protecting Indigenous lands.
• ✈️ In a key example, MapBiomas mapped nearly 3,000 airstrips in the Amazon in three weeks, aiding the Brazilian government in shutting them down and leading to a 90% drop in illegal gold miners on Indigenous lands.
• 🤝 MapBiomas operates as a collaborative network of over 100 organizations, aiming to cover 70% of the world's tropical forests by 2030 with local map production capabilities.
• 🌱 The goal is to replace the sounds of destruction with the sounds of life.