SCO at the One Forest Summit

Like the SCO, the One Forest Summit (OFS) initiative was born out of the One Planet Summit to advance our collective ambition for the conservation and sustainable management of tropical forests.

But how can these forests be preserved when they are disappearing so rapidly? In response to this problem, the SCO has approved the TropiSCO project, which is being carried out by the CNES, CESBIO and the company GlobEO.  Already operational, the system makes it possible to monitor and visualise tropical deforestation in near-real time using radar satellite imagery. Thierry Koleck, remote sensing specialist at CNES and co-leader of the project, presented the TropiSCO platform to more than 20 countries representing the major forest basins. Our ambassador projected live three very concrete visualisations of deforestation in progress: that caused by urbanisation in South-East Asia, by subsistence farming in Gabon and by gold mining in Suriname.

See the TropiSCO presentation in Libreville (from 0H40 to 0H46, in French)

"TropiSCO is a tool based on collaboration, particularly as its deployment in a country requires reliable forest/non-forest maps as a first step. It is currently working on seven countries and three others are being processed, thanks to the national cooperation of the space agencies of Gabon, Vietnam and Brazil, as well as the international cooperation of the UN, including the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO)," explains Thierry Koleck.

The Gabonese space agency AGEOS will now integrate TropiSCO data into its forest observation system, and contacts have been made with organisations in Central Africa with a view to extending the system to the African continent. With the ultimate goal of global coverage, discussions with the Joint Research Center, the European Union's scientific and technical research centre, provided an opportunity to discuss opportunities for developing TropiSCO in European projects.

Another highlight of the summit was the Hack4Forest hackathon, organised by the SING incubator with the support of the IRD research and development institute, which saw four projects emerge on the theme of the link between the tropical forest and human society. From responsible tourism to the preservation of medicinal plants, most of them proposed mobile applications to make them accessible to the greatest number of people.

The One Forest Summit resulted in the "Libreville Plan", an agreement between forest countries and the international community to reconcile environmental ambition and economic development. It includes several initiatives to protect the most vital reserves of carbon and biodiversity.