Accessible deforestation intelligence with MapHub’s Forest Report
By: Marena Brinkhurst
Today is International Day of Forests, so we’re celebrating the work of a partner that is helping to protect rainforest by increasing supply-chain transparency. MapHubs created Forest Report to make it easier for businesses and regulators to monitor deforestation and pinpoint who is causing it. I caught up with MapHubs founder Leo Bottrill to learn more.
Why are companies interested in deforestation?
Thanks to increasing awareness of the ecological and social costs of oil palm expansion and other industries that are clearing rainforest, more and more companies are under pressure from consumers and regulators to ensure that they source products responsibly. While initiatives such as the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil have gained some traction and major corporations like Nestlé, Proctor & Gamble, Walmart, and Cargill have made new commitments to become ‘deforestation free’, there is growing recognition that strengthened laws and enforcement are required to drive better practices across supply chains.
How does one monitor for deforestation across a supply chain? One of the best ways to do this at scale is to use satellite imagery and remote sensing to detect changes in forest cover. But many companies and organizations don’t have the resources to do this. Forest Report makes this tech accessible for any organization.
How does Forest Report make this monitoring easier?
Forest Report is a simple browser-based tool that lets you turn raw data — like satellite imagery, remote sensing data, and land use information — into customized, actionable reports. Forest Report automates monitoring for deforestation and fires across thousands of locations and specific areas of interest, such as a particular company’s cocoa farms or oil palm concessions. These reports are ready to be shared elsewhere online or downloaded as a PDF.
By using technologies like Mapbox, we’ve created a way to do cloud-based geospatial analysis at scale. Before, something like calculating the forest cover within a 50km radius of thousands of individual palm oil mills would take a GIS specialist many hours to analyze and process. Forest Report breaks this project into small tasks and runs them in parallel in the cloud using a combination of Amazon AWS and our own servers.
We saw another use case during the 2019 fires in the Amazon rainforest — many people wanted frequent, up-to-date reports on forest loss there. In Forest Report, a user could run a query on areas of interest, like all the indigenous territories in the Amazon, and then generate maps or rankings to show which territories are most affected by the fires or other sources of deforestation.
Have you seen specific companies change their supply chains?
One of Forest Report’s users is Mighty Earth — a global forest protection watchdog. We helped them use Forest Report to create a Rapid Response system that automatically reports on deforestation within 3,500 palm oil concessions in Indonesia and Sarawak, Malaysia. This system is triggered by remote-sensing detection of deforestation and then generates a report of what deforestation is occurring and which oil palm concessions and mills are involved. Using Mighty Earth’s detailed supply chain research, we can connect this to specific agricultural traders and consumer companies. Mighty Earth then sends these reports to the procurement and sustainability officers at these companies, files official grievances, and posts alerts on the Mighty Earth website. This negative attention ultimately puts pressure on palm oil producers and traders to prevent deforestation in their concessions so they don’t lose their buyers.
In the two years since launching the Forest Report Rapid Response system, Mighty Earth has filed 949 grievances. Already, several major palm oil trading companies have demanded clearance moratoria with certain suppliers and suspended some purchase agreements. For example, when Mighty reported that plantation company PT Agriprima Cipta Persada had cleared 2,847 hectares of forest, a number of companies including Cargill and Wilmar raised concerns — which led to the plantation company stopping all clearing and enacting a no deforestation policy across all of their holdings.
What were key design considerations when you built Forest Report?
Most of the MapHubs software is open-source and uses many open-source projects developed by Mapbox including Mapbox GL. We decided to use Mapbox basemaps because we needed very efficient maps with high-impact visuals. Many of our users are in countries with slow bandwidth, so using vector tiles dramatically improves performance and provides a much smoother user experience.
Open data is also a key ingredient — especially OpenStreetMap, which we contribute to directly and use through Mapbox basemaps. Through the tasking manager we manage at OSM Earth, open mapping contributors can add data such as protected areas, logging roads, palm oil plantations to OpenStreetMap, and then that data is added to Mapbox’s maps and services.
What’s next for Forest Report and MapHubs?
We’ve been focusing on the development of Orangalerts, which is an add-on service to Forest Report designed to specifically identify and highlight impacts on orangutan habitat areas. Palm oil expansion is a major reason orangutans are critically endangered species, and unfortunately government policies and corporate commitments to protect orangutan habitat are so far proving ineffective. We built Orangalerts to make it easier for companies to identify when they are buying from palm oil suppliers that have a high risk of destroying orangutan habitat.
We’re also trying out more visualization techniques to further illustrate the link between palm oil refineries and mills and we’re experimenting with more geospatial tools to refine analysis options within Forest Report. We’re interested in using the Mapbox Isochrone API for estimating travel time of palm oil from a plantation to a mill. Palm oil needs to be processed within about 24 hours so unlike other crops the mills need to be relatively close by. Using road network data instead of straight line distance would give us a new way to assess risk in terms of how close an area of deforestation is to a given mill. This would be a game-changer because it would let us extend the traceability of harvested palm all the way to the plantation-level, not only the mill-level, and thereby further improve transparency and accountability in the palm oil industry.
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