CANCUN, Mexico, (Reuters) – Google Inc unveiled technology yesterday it says will help build trust between rich and poor countries on projects designed to protect the world’s tropical forests.
Measuring the success of forest-protection plans in places like the Amazon, Indonesia and the Congo basin has always been difficult because tree disease, corruption, and illegal logging threaten vast remote areas that scientists can’t monitor by land.
The future of the projects are important to global talks on climate being held in Cancun for two weeks ending Dec. 10 because forest destruction is responsible for up to 17 percent of mankind’s greenhouse gas emissions.
The platform, called Google Earth Engine, takes vast amounts of forest images from U.S. and French satellites and crunches it at shared data centers, through cloud computing. It allows scientists to monitor forests from their own computers in minutes or seconds instead of the hours or days it took before.
Google also wants to eventually sell access to advanced aspects of the tool to carbon traders, policy makers, and researchers working in forestry.
Global deals among nations to protect forests have been slowed by the lack of transparency and the failure of the United States to pass a climate bill that would have boosted a global market in carbon offsets.
But negotiators at the climate talks believe progress can be made on a global plan called reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation, or REDD, in which rich countries would fund rewards for developing and poor nations like Brazil, Indonesia and several in Africa such as Rwanda, that save and restore forests.
Google hopes its tool will help speed cooperation in REDD which could lead to further global agreements on climate.
“How does a rich donor nation gain a level of comfort that what is being recorded about forest protection projects is in fact what is taking place?” said Rebecca Moore, Earth Engine’s engineering manager, on the sidelines of the U.N. global warming talks.
