I’ve spent my whole career trying to create maps that are used to stop and reverse deforestation. This was the main driver behind starting Space Intelligence with my co-founder Murray Collins back in 2018: we wanted to build a company that could create really high quality maps, leveraging our experience of tropical ecology and the petabytes of open satellite data available, to create trusted maps that would enable a zero deforestation world.
But just creating the datasets is clearly not enough: tropical deforestation has marched on at pretty much the same rate in the 2020s as has done for my whole life (apart from a small blip in 2020 caused by the pandemic).
So I’m delighted to announce today that Space Intelligence is partnering with ICE to provide the mapping data for a new service called ICE CoT (Commodity Traceability Service) – a web system that will enable companies to ensure the commodities they sell have not come from recently deforested land. This service is initially focused around coffee and cocoa and compliance with the EU’s Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), which comes into effect 1st January 2025 and makes it illegal to sell certain products in the EU that have come from land deforested after 2020.
More than 30 people in our team (data scientists, ecologists, satellite data experts, AI scientists and software engineers) have been working over the past months to create high quality maps over the major coffee and cocoa producing countries, in order to provide the data that can provide companies with confidence they are meeting the EUDR standards. Producing maps that meet the stringent requirements of the EUDR legislation is hard: for example we have to be able to differentiate between areas where cacao trees were already growing under the forest canopy in 2020 (cocoa allowed into the EU), and those where the cacao trees were planted after 2020 (not allowed). Fortunately we’ve built the best mapping team and technology in the world at Space Intelligence, so this is a challenge we can meet!
I’m excited about working together with ICE to provide the necessary data to their customers and ensure deforestation-free supply chains, to help reverse the climate and biodiversity crises.
