Global Forest Watch: Fighting Deforestation with Satellites, Open Data, and Crowdsourcing

Satellites, open data, crowdsourcing – these are some of the hottest buzzwords in the tech industry right now. But these innovations aren’t just limited to Silicon Valley and start-ups – they have come to dominate much of our everyday lives. Each time we open apps like Yelp and Foursquare to find the closest Starbucks or the best rated restaurant, we rely on these technologies. Now the World Resources Institute has taken these same tools and applied them to create a new and exciting platform to help people everywhere track the health of the world’s forests. The platform launched this week and it is called Global Forest Watch.

Global Forest Watch (GFW) is an interactive online forest monitoring and alert system that will provide real-time and reliable data about forests around the world. GFW uses satellite technology to collect high-resolution images of forests and cloud computing capabilities to create shareable mapped data sets on forests. It has also been designed as a crowd-sourcing tool to enable users to directly upload their own observations from the field. Most importantly, it is completely free and easy to use. If you can use Google Maps, you will be able to use GFW to find out what is happening to forests near you and around the globe.

The World Resources Institute worked with over 40 major partners to create GFW – receiving input from businesses like Unilever and developing the site in partnership with major technology companies like Google, international organizations including the UN Environment Program, and a number of leading NGOs. The UK has also been a key partner – DFID provided $5 million to support GFW’s development.

The UK is excited about tools like GFW because tackling deforestation is a huge priority. Thanks to new research we know that the world’s forests are under serious threat. Fifty soccer fields’ worth of forests are lost every minute of every day. That’s a real source of concern when deforestation accounts for 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, the second-largest source after electricity generation. But deforestation isn’t just an environmental problem – it also affects poor people in developing countries.

1.2 billion poor people around the world depend heavily on forests for their income and for basic necessities such as food, fuel, and wood. Consequently, the destruction of forests disproportionately affects the poorest communities and most marginalized groups, including indigenous people and women. When these populations are confronted with illegal logging encroaching on their land, ambiguous laws and contested land tenure have made it difficult for them to protect forests.

DFID has already invested about $133 million in a forest governance, markets, and climate programme that focuses on the underlying causes of deforestation by strengthening forest sector governance, addressing illegal logging, and going after corruption. But DFID will not make progress alone – deforestation is a global challenge that has been difficult to tackle because information about forests has been out-of-date, inaccessible, inaccurate, or inconsistent across regions.

GFW represents an important solution to these barriers. GFW will not only provide good data on forests, but also become a tool of transparency and accountability. Governments can now use GFW’s data to better enforce their own forest laws, indigenous communities will be able to upload their alerts of illegal forest operations, and NGOs can hold governments or private companies accountable for their commitments to protect forests.

As the international community debates its post-2015 development goals, we should look to GFW as an example of the way we might design creative, inclusive methods to tackling complex global issues. GFW combines innovative technologies and partnerships across different parts of society to empower everyday citizens to take action. So whether you’re a deforestation expert, a development worker, or a regular app user with a smartphone, you can now join the effort to monitor and protect forests.

Yesterday the World Resources Institute (WRI) officially launched GFW in Washington DC at the Newseum. If you missed the event, check out a video of the launch here and track the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #gfwlaunch.  Check out the GFW site now and get involved!