However, as at Amazon, identifying problem areas only gets you so far if there aren’t enough resources to make those findings. Nature Conservancy uses its AI model to inform conversations with land managers about potential threats to wildlife or biodiversity. Conservation enforcement in the Mojave Desert is overseen by the United States Bureau of Land Management, the only agency about 270 rangers and commandos on duty.
In Northern Europe, the company Iceye has begun monitoring the accumulation of ice in the waters near Finland using microsatellites and machine learning. But over the past two years, the company began predicting flood damage using microwave-wavelength images that can see through clouds at any time of day. The biggest challenge right now, said Shay Strong, Iceye’s vice president of analytics, isn’t the spacecraft engineering, data processing or fine-tuning machine learning models that have become ubiquitous. It deals with institutions stuck in centuries-old ways of functioning.
“We can more or less understand where things are going, we can get an image, we can create an analysis. But the biggest challenge we face today is still working with insurance companies or the government,” she said.
“It’s a step forward,” said Hamed Alemohammad, data science lead at the nonprofit Radiant Earth Foundation, which uses satellite imagery to address sustainability goals like ending poverty. local coordination and follow-up. “That’s where I think the industry needs to focus and put in more effort. It’s not just about a fancy blog post and deep learning models”.
It’s often not just about getting policymakers involved. In one Analysis of the year 2020, a group of academic, government and industry researchers highlights the fact that the African continent has the majority of the world’s fallow arable land and is expected to account for a large portion of the increase global population in the coming decades. Satellite imagery and machine learning could reduce dependence on food imports and make Africa the cradle of the world. However, they say, lasting change will require the accumulation of professional talent with technical knowledge and government support so that Africans can create technology that meets their needs. needs of the continent instead of importing solutions from elsewhere. They write: “The path from satellite imagery to public policy decisions is not an easy one.
Labaly Toure is a co-author of that paper and chair of the geospatial department at an agricultural university in Senegal. As the founder of Geomatica, a company that provides automated satellite imaging solutions to farmers in West Africa, he has seen satellite imagery and machine learning help decision makers realize how Salt runoff can affect irrigation and crop yield. He also finds it helps with questions about how long a family has been on the farm and helps with land management issues.
Sometimes free satellite images from services like NASA’s LandSat or the European Space Agency’s Sentinel program are enough, but some projects require high-resolution photos from commercial providers. and cost can be a challenge.
“If the decision makers knew [the value] It can be easy, but if they don’t know, it’s not always easy,” says Toure.
Back in Brazil, in the absence of federal support, Imazon is now establishing relationships with more policymakers at the state level. “Currently, there is no evidence that the federal government will lead conservation or deforestation efforts in the Amazon,” Souza said. In October 2022, Imazon signed agreements to cooperate with prosecutors who collect evidence of environmental crimes in 4 Brazilian states on the Amazon rainforest border to share information that can help prioritize enforcement resources.
When you prosecute protected deforestation, the damage has already been done. Now, Imazon wants to use AI to stop deforestation before it happens, interweaving that road detection model with one designed to predict which communities bordering the Amazon are at risk of loss. highest forest next year.
Deforestation continues in historical rate as early as 2022, but Souza hopes that through working with nonprofit partners, Imazon can expand its deforestation AI to seven other South American countries with Amazon rainforests.
And Brazil will hold presidential elections this fall. The current leader in the polls, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is expected to strengthen enforcement agencies weakened by Bolsonaro and reestablish the Amazon Fund for water reforestation investments. outside. Lula’s environment plan is not expected for a few months, but environment ministers from his previous term in office guess he will make afforestation the foundation of his foundation.
