FIRES

 Forest-rich nations are seriously impacted by deforestation and forest and land fires. If certain commodity sectors or individual corporate actors have disproportionately benefited from historic deforestation and fire, or are implicated in current fires, they need to be held to account.

We work to answer the following questions: 

What is driving deforestation and fire in these forest regions and who is benefiting?

Have the areas burned by fire expanded over the recent decades, potentially because of global warming? 

What is the exact role and significance of agribusiness – soya and pasture in Brazil, oil palm and pulp & paper in Indonesia – in promoting/ benefiting from fires  over time? 

We develop satellite-based alert system that can detect the areas burned by fire in near-real time is also under development to carry out rapid assessment of damaged areas, quickly identify what areas are impacted and who might be responsible as it happens, and take rapid actions. 

To better document the trends and drivers of deforestation and fire over the last decades, we go back in time with satellites to develop annual maps that consistently track deforestation, area burnt by fires, and the concomitant expansion of industrial plantations of soya, pasture, oil palm and pulpwood plantations.

Such analyses opens up new possibilities for deforestation and fire accountability linked to commodity sectors and individual corporate actors.