Gilbert Ekugbe
The Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) has lamented that over 10 million hectares of forests are lost globally on a yearly basis as a result deforestation.
In its latest report to mark the International Day of Forests, FAO said approximately 70 million hectares of land are also affected by fires, pointing out the urgent need for countries across the globe to adopt new solutions to address deforestation.
FAO said technologies showcasing transformative innovations such as advances in forest monitoring, early warning systems and other vital technical solutions that are being used to help countries halt deforestation and forest degradation.
“We are in the midst of a forest data revolution driven by innovation and technology, enabling countries to track and report on their forests more easily and effectively,” said FAO Deputy Director-General Maria Helena Semedo.
According to FAO, technological innovation has vastly improved its ability to monitor the world’s forests and offer a robust way to guide actions to protect, restore and sustainably use forests and in particular, can empower Indigenous Peoples who take care of many remote forested areas.
The International Day of Forests event saw the launch of Ground, a path breaking new mobile application within FAO’s highly-successful Open Foris initiative, developed in collaboration with Google and benefiting from the increasing availability of satellite imagery.
Open Foris already includes SEPAL and Earth Map, which allow users to access and process historical and new satellite data that, thanks to the intuitive ease and big-data capabilities of Google Earth Engine, enable highly granular visualization and statistical analysis of vegetation, climate, water, forests and other datasets that can generate tailored products for local needs both quickly and for free.
Some 90 per cent of countries reporting 13.7 billion tonnes of forest emission reductions or enhancements used Open Foris. Open Foris has been used by over 200,000 individuals from 196 countries.
“Open Foris Ground was envisioned as a map-based tool that could be used in a variety of contexts with little or no special training. Indigenous people can collect data about their own lands with minimal outside help, on top of high-resolution satellite imagery from Google Earth,” said Google Earth Director Rebecca Moore.
“Open Foris Ground enables smallholder farmers and local communities to report data that is important to their livelihoods, from the ground to the cloud. This is the most recent development in our near-decade long partnership with FAO, where among other efforts, we helped countries realize forest-based climate action,” she added.
Moore stressed that Ground would help further technological innovation across FAO’s mandate and inaugurate a new multi-year Memorandum of Understanding signed between FAO and Google, adding that the new MoU would deepen the engagement from the MoU signed in 2015, which has catalyzed numerous geospatial solutions enabling FAO Members to dramatically upscale environmental literacy and implement science-based policies in practically real time, not to mention combat locusts.
“It is increasingly evident how large a role forests will play in climate actions. That makes transparent and reliable assessments of forest carbon fluxes even more imperative, both to improve knowledge and to unlock results-based finance. The important technological contributions made in the past decade, buoyed by the provision of digital public goods as demonstrated by FAO, Google Earth Engine and many other Open Foris partners, offer grounds for optimism,” FAO added.
