Google Proposes Plan to Save the World’s Forests

On Thursday, Google.org unveiled its new deforestation satellite at the International Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, in effort to curb worldwide deforestation.

The Web giant suggests that the “high-performance satellite-imagery processing system” can be used alongside a proposed United Nations program to help fight climate change.

While Brazil's Iguazu National Park is a protected area, the Amazon rainforest suffered the largest net loss of forests between 2000 and 2005 of around 4.3 million hectares per year as a result of clearing land for cattle ranches and soybean farms. Photo: Amanda Wills, Earth911.com

According to Mother Nature Network, “The platform shows intact forests in green, new degradation in orange, old deforestation in yellow and new deforestation in red for selected time periods, allowing users to analyze the rate of forest loss with visuals that are easy to process.”

Not only are emissions from tropical deforestation comparable to emissions from the entire European Union, but they account for more than those of cars, trucks, planes, ships and trains worldwide, according to Google.

But while the U.S. has pumped millions into conservation this year, the Stern Review says preserving the world’s standing forests is a more cost-effective way to limit carbon emissions. As a result, The U.N. has proposed a framework known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries), providing financial incentives to rainforest nations to protect their forests.

“Implementing a global REDD system will require that each nation have the ability to accurately monitor and report the state of their forests over time, in a manner that is independently verifiable,” says Google. “However, many of these tropical nations of the world lack the technological resources to do this, so we’re working with scientists, governments and non-profits to change this.”