If you’ve eaten an avocado from Mexico, chocolate from Ghana or pretty much anything with Indonesian palm oil in it, Ecometrica has probably had a say in it.
The Edinburgh company uses images from satellites to map deforestation in all three countries, where it helps government agencies to control the over-farming that is contributing to climate change. It also works in Brazil, where this year’s fires have made the Amazon rain forest an even hotter topic than usual thanks partly to the efforts of a Swedish schoolgirl.
Dr Richard Tipper is in a better position than most to sort facts from distortions as he observes satellite images plotting damage to the world’s largest carbon sink. He agrees that the situation has worsened since controversial president Jair Bolsonaro came to power.
But that is not the full story, says the executive chairman of Scotland’s world-leading authority on deforestation.
Asked if the situation has deteriorated recently, he says: “I think it has and I think the causes behind that are quite complex. Possibly the change of government and its focus on being pro-agriculture and less strongly defensive of the environment has been part of it.
“However, I think there have been other factors. I think the US-China trade war has probably played a part in the sense that China is now sourcing less soy beans from the US, so they’re sourcing more from Brazil. It has also been a somewhat drier year as well so there are a number of factors at play that have caused the land use change and associated fires.”
Tipper co-founded Ecometrica 2008 after graduating from the University of Edinburgh and working as an adviser in agricultural science and economics. After working for a few years as a consultant on forestry and the carbon cycle, he realised heavy duty software and data gleaned from satellite images were needed to convince governments and corporations to take the climate change situation seriously.
The onus in increasingly on companies to demonstrate that everything they do in house and through their supply chains is meeting standards set by bodies such as the UK Carbon Disclosure Project and the UK government’s Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting (SECR). That has led to a healthy increase in business for Ecometrica, which provides monitoring systems for businesses and advises them on how to comply.
Once they have been shown the facts and what they have to achieve, it’s up to them how they do it.
“We’re not there to say, turn this fan off,” says Tipper. “It’s about the broader view right across the portfolio of the business and how they’re doing at the semi-annual or annual level.”
Ecometrica now works with business and government agencies across Europe, Africa, Asia and South America. Its Forests 2020 project has been funded by the UK Government to address deforestation in the world’s most fragile ecosystems.
The forest fires of the last month or so followed controversy over Bolsonaro’s denial that deforestation was accelerating and the removal of the head of Inpe, Brazil’s state agency for satellite monitoring, who had failed to concur. Ecometrica works closely with Inpe but “hasn’t seen any changes … yet”.
Ironically, after a summer of relentless gloom from the Amazon, Tipper says the medium-term picture there has been positive. “It’s a huge country with a lot going on and it’s a complex picture. Over the past 10 years in general there’s been an improvement of environmental management. A lot of it has been linked to better monitoring by government agencies, and to some extent by NGOs. Systems have improved over time, especially in the Amazon.”
Much of Ecometrica’s work centres on the Cerrado biome, south of the Amazon and Brazil’s second largest area of rain forest. Tipper describes it as a “Cinderella story” because while popular attention is focused on its bigger neighbour, destruction of the Cerrado has been more severe.
He says: “It is drier and is the main agricultural area of Brazil. It is an area bigger than western Europe, and it’s not the typical rain forest because it’s more fragmented woodlands and grasslands and now agriculture. It’s a highly diverse ecosystem but because it’s readily accessible to agriculture, it has been converted and depleted at a much higher rate than the Amazon. The Amazon is important in terms of the big numbers, particularly in the global carbon cycle, but perhaps the Cerrado has been overlooked.”
Tipper’s view carry considerable influence as a member of the UK Roster of Experts on Climate Change and the author of reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
He insists the challenge of saving the world’s carbon sinks must be an international one, not a burden to be disproportionately borne by Brazil. There is no point in countries such as the UK preaching environmental protection to Brazil when it has deforested its own land over centuries and lags behind much of Europe in putting that right, while enjoying the financial benefits of North Sea oil and gas.
Tipper said: “There’s a lot of discussions going on in Europe about trade, because a lot of Brazil’s agriculture is related to export trade, either to Europe or to some extent the US and to China now, and the extent to which trade negotiations are becoming linked to environmental standards is going to be an ongoing and increasing theme. The Brazilians might say, it’s just the Europeans being protectionist, whereas the European position is that it farms to very high environmental standards, so we shouldn’t allow products in that aren’t produced to the same standards.
“That’s an interesting dialogue to see happening and I think the kind of data we’ve produced is being used in those kinds of debates.”
Europe and North America should not be too smug about forest cover levels anyway. Tipper predicts increasing challenges for woodland in the Arctic region as global warming affects trees that are suited to a cold climate.
“The Boreal country, such as Russia, has been having problems recently with illegal logging and fires and diseases, as has Canada. I think those very northern forests can have challenges with climate change. Temperate forests may also come under a lot of stress from climate change, with new diseases coming through, and Mediterranean forests will also have stresses put on them. So I don’t think any one country can be satisfied that it’s all fine or be complacent.
“But it’s not a disaster – I think there are opportunities for improvement and there are things that can be done.”
