Deforestation & Forest Carbon

Monitor deforestation and carbon equivalent emissions across the agricultural supply chain
Consumer GoodsAgriculture
Go beyond raw deforestation alerting

Powered by remote sensing, machine learning, and the fusion of multiple datasets; the Descartes Labs Tropical Deforestation Monitoring package helps agricultural merchants, suppliers, and NGOs quantify progress toward deforestation and emissions commitments. With Descartes Labs, you can:

 

  • Guard against reputational risk by tracking progress toward your goals and acting on your sustainability commitments
  • Proactively verify commitments and accelerate progress towards net-zero disclosures
  • Easily prioritize potential deforestation events for follow-up and resolution with suppliers
  • Establish a basis for responding to deforestation grievances from NGOs
  • More accurately score a supplier’s risk level when performing due diligence
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Proven performance

97%

accurate forest maps

94%

accurate palm map

12 days

between deforestation updates
The technology
Our deforestation detector uses data from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 radar satellite to provide near-real-time deforestation alerts at 20m resolution, with updates every 12 days.

Deforestation detector

Unlike competing solutions, we combine SAR data with our proprietary InSAR pipeline to produce more signal and less noise.

Forest & commodity maps

Our proprietary maps classify land in commodity growing regions to provide target areas of operation for our deforestation detection and forest carbon models.

Forest carbon maps

We combine satellite imagery and space-borne LiDAR to estimate aboveground biomass in the world’s forests, and to monitor carbon loss due to deforestation.

Case Study

Historical deforestation for a region in Kalimantan, Borneo

Historical deforestation for a region in Kalimantan, Borneo

Protecting the world's forests with Unilever

Unilever, a multinational consumer packaged goods company that manages 400 brands, partnered with Descartes Labs to implement advanced deforestation monitoring and near-real-time alerting throughout their supply chains. Unilever relies on the Descartes Labs Platform to scientifically measure and validate their zero deforestation commitments, as well as to inform their post-2020 sustainable sourcing agenda.

 

To help them accomplish this, we used Sentinel-2 imagery from the Descartes Labs Platform to quickly create cloud-free composites and forest maps using cloud and haze-free pixels from one of the cloudiest regions on the planet - Southeast Asia. This work feeds our ongoing deforestation alerting, which provides critical metadata to palm buyers including the type of deforestation (smallholder vs industrial) and the speed at which deforestation is occurring.

We used this composite to build a forest map with 97% accuracy and a palm map with 94% accuracy, well exceeding Unilever’s accuracy requirements.
Art of the Possible
In order to build a path to proven, incontestable compliance for sustainability and net-zero emissions commitments, companies need to develop a more holistic solution to get to net-zero. We believe zero-deforestation is a key piece of that.
Quantify historical deforestation and carbon equivalent across the supply chain to measure your progress against a baseline
Report historical and real-time carbon equivalent from deforestation and generate quantitative insights for internal carbon accounting teams.
Download the datasheet
Ready to get started?
To understand what’s happening across the agriculture commodity supply chain, organizations need integrated tools to achieve wholesale change and increase traceability and transparency on the ground. Descartes Labs’ emerging technology and data science approaches are central to achieving this goal.
Contact us today