Harnessing Tech for Trees: Google Earth Engine & FAO Drive Forest Climate Action
By Noel Gorelick, Chief Extraterrestrial Observer, and Tanya Birch, Sr. Program Manager, Google Earth Engine
Today is International Day of Forests, a day designated by the United Nations to celebrate our world’s forests and their contributions to the planet. Forests are critical to nature and biodiversity, and play an important role in fighting climate change due to their ability to store carbon.
Over the past decade, we’ve partnered with the Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations on a number of efforts, including helping to reduce deforestation around the world. Today, we’re sharing key outcomes from this partnership — including how we’ve been able to help countries meaningfully reduce emissions aided by Google Earth & Earth Engine, and provide new data and tools to more accurately measure deforestation threats. Google Earth Engine offers one of the world’s largest publicly available earth observation data catalogs. It combines continuously updated data from hundreds of satellites and other sources. This data is used to power platforms like FAO’s SEPAL, used by countries to monitor and report on deforestation.
Helping countries monitor deforestation with Google Earth & Earth Engine
Reducing deforestation and forest degradation and restoring forests are critical pathways to meeting the 2030 global goals. Realizing this, world leaders have committed to halting deforestation and restoring more than 1 billion hectares of degraded land. However, progress has been hindered due to the lack of information at various levels. But there is progress — and Google Earth and Google Earth Engine have been a key part of the solution.
From 2013–2019, countries like Costa Rica, Ecuador and Chile were aided by Google Earth and Google Earth Engine geospatial technology to precisely measure the volume of emissions they were able to reduce and receive payment for — which we estimate totaled 95Mt CO2e¹ avoided emissions.
Providing open data to help reduce deforestation from agriculture
In addition to helping countries measure deforestation, we’re also working with FAO as part of the Forest Data Partnership to create community models & data products that are openly licensed to identify land where commodity crops like palm oil, cocoa, coffee, soy, and wood are grown around the world. What makes these models & data products unique is the iterative approach that brings training and validation data from multiple sources, and will evolve and improve as more contributions are provided. This information is critical to helping companies comply with the European Union Deforestation Regulation, which requires companies to demonstrate that goods sold or produced in the EU were not grown on land deforested after December 30, 2020. This data (such as this community data product for palm oil produced by Google for the Forest Data Partnership) is going to help companies make more informed decisions for their purchasing of commodity crops.
Empowering smallholder farmers and ensuring access to markets
Lastly, we’re also partnering with FAO on a free, open source map-based Android app that will help communities report valuable information about what crop is growing on a plot of land, to help enable them to have continued access to the EU market. Developed by Google and FAO, Open Foris Ground is a new app in the Open Foris software suite, and with this tool, local communities, indigenous people and smallholder farmers can share timestamped evidence of what crop they are farming with precise location information on top of Google Earth’s satellite imagery.
This data will then contribute to the understanding of what that plot of land has actually been used for, and improve commodity crop datasets. Commodity crop maps are produced using AI models, which are trained on data from the field. The more data that comes from the ground, the higher accuracy the maps are, and the more data there is to validate the accuracy of the model. Open Foris Ground enables farmers who want to prove they are not connected to deforestation to share that proof, supporting due diligence on deforestation from commodity crop production to companies complying with EUDR.
These are just a few of the ways our long-standing partnership with FAO has helped provide countries, researchers, nonprofits and governments with the insights they need to act on their climate plans. To learn more about how Google Earth Engine is empowering organizations, visit https://earthengine.google.com/.
[1] The range of avoided emissions aided by Earth Engine are estimated between 92–102 MtCO2e and are based on UNFCCC forest-based climate reporting. The most recent payments are from 2019, and many more national reports are in the process of validation and verification for future payments.
