At the UNFCCC Meetings in Copenhagen, Google.org, the technology firm’s philanthropic arm, announced the release of new software that will help remove one of the roadblocks to increased global investment in reforestation — access to historical and current high-performance satellite imagery of forests. Google writes: “What if we could offer scientists and tropical nations access to a high-performance satellite imagery-processing engine running online, in the “Google cloud”? And what if we could gather together all of the earth’s raw satellite imagery data — petabytes of historical, present and future data — and make it easily available on this platform?”
Google will “re-implement” two software programs commonly used to analyze forest change in a prototype platform and give researchers and activists “easy access to terabytes of satellite imagery and thousands of computers in our data centers.” The two programs that will get souped up on Google’s servers include Carnegie Landsat Analysis System (CLASlite), a software developed by Greg Asner of Carnegie Institution for Science, and Sistema de Alerta de Deforestation (SAD), created by Carlos Souza of Imazon. Google adds that while these programs are widely used by researchers, more ”widespread use of this analysis has been hampered by lack of access to satellite imagery data and computational resources for processing.”
Tropical deforestation emissions account for some 20 percent of total CO2 emissions. This makes the emissions from deforestation comparable to the “emissions of all of the European Union, and are greater than those of all cars, trucks, planes, ships and trains worldwide.” Protecting the world’s forests is a cost-effective way to sequester CO2 and mitigate the adverse impacts of climate change.
Negotiations on REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries), which are seen as critical to a comprehensive global plan on climate change mitigation, will provide funds for countries that preserve their forests. However, many developed countries want technological systems in place that can be used to verify developing countries are indeed preserving forests with funds received. In other proposals for limiting CO2 reductions, developing countries have balked at what they see as the extra burdens verification will place on their economies. Free, openly accessible software could aid in verification.
Read more about Google’s project, as well as Cisco’s proposals.
Image credit: Inhabitat
