SCO invites itself into Fortnite!

Published on 12/03/2025

Climate change is everyone's business. Using an unexpected but very popular information channel, the SCO and Communication teams at CNES are offering the Fortnite adventure "Amazonia: Space to the rescue". The aim is to use satellite data to solve perilous situations and save the Earth's beautiful - and much-needed - biodiversity.

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Amazonia: space to the rescue, a fun and educational adventure. © Game in Society

In 2024, the CNES Sustainable Development Delegation was approached by the Game in Society studio and the Rainforest association, which works to protect the indigenous populations of Amazonia. Their idea: to bring together their expertise to promote awareness-raising through the world of gaming.

👉Why Fortnite? Because it's a fun way of raising awareness among a wide audience, especially young people, of the challenges posed by climate and environmental crises, through the responses that can be implemented thanks, in part, to space data.

👉Why the Amazon? Because it's home to some of the richest biodiversity on the planet, and to the departure point for satellites bound for space: the CSG (Guiana Space Center), also known as Europe's Spaceport.

👉Why CNES? Because it is responsible for the CSG, whose biodiversity it preserves through various actions, and because it pilots SCO France, which accelerates climate services worldwide, including in Amazonia.

The game in brief

Welcome to a 30-minute journey on foot, by pirogue, and even by seaplane! All starts in Kourou, where Ariane 6 has just taken off from CSG with an Earth observation satellite. While you are carrying out "ground truth" surveys to compare the satellite data with reality, a fire breaks out in the middle of the forest...

More information on cnes.fr

The SCO in the adventure

"Amazonia is an epic approach to the use of satellite data. The SCO has its rightful place as a demonstrator of the potential application of these data for environmental preservation and in the fight against the impacts of climate change" comments Célie Losada, SCO project manager at CNES, who took part in the development of the game.

Indeed, while the player collects satellite data and discovers Guiana's biodiversity throughout his adventure, he is also led to use tools directly from projects developed within the SCO framework:

ALEOFEU , to prevent and fight forest fires in the Aude department.
Chove-Chuva, developed in Mato-Grosso (Brazil) to provide and cross-reference dynamic indicators on land use (forests, agriculture, water resources).
OpHySE, to monitor river conditions in real time and improve navigability in French Guiana.
Stock Water, to monitor the load on hydraulic dams worldwide.
TropiSCO, to track global tropical deforestation in near-real time.

For Célie Losada, who began her career as an environmental engineer at CSG, the involvement was total: "Working on this epic project took me back with pleasure to my native French Guiana! It was really great to be able to showcase the CSG's environmental programs, in which I had taken part a few years earlier, and to highlight the SCO's projects, to which I am so proud to contribute today. Game in Society brilliantly illustratedall our ideas, reproducing the Ariane 6 launch pad and the CSG's emblematic animal and plant species as close to reality as possible."

🎮 Get ready for adventure, fire up your console or computer head for Fortnite on the mission "Amazonia - l’espace à la rescousse".