Open Conversations: Climate Data Belongs in the Commons (Diego Saez Gil)
Funding the Commons Open Conversations · 3:17
Diego Saez Gil of Pachama argues that opening satellite, airborne and ground data held by companies and universities would let everyone working on planetary problems improve their models, and he names airborne data gathered by planes over forests as the set he most wants in a commons. His company estimates tree height from remote sensing as a proxy for carbon content, then uses AI to choose reference regions that show whether a forest intervention adds regeneration. He points to reforestation outside Rio de Janeiro, where rain is returning after 15 years, and urges builders to keep working when the field is out of fashion.
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From Funding the Commons Open Conversations, hosted by Funding the Commons.
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The biggest things standing on the way is we still need the majority of the global economy to realize that business cannot exist without the substrate of the biosphere. Therefore, the necessity of taking responsibility for that biosphere. I'm Diego Sai Gil, co-founder and CEO of Pachama, and we're working on the mission of helping restore nature and solve climate change. It's been six and a half years of building Pachama. We have raised almost $90 million in capital from incredible investors who are impact oriented.
Today we are capable of estimating the the height of a tree anywhere in the world using remote sensing data and the height of a tree is a good proxy for carbon content. Effectively we are able to predict how much carbon is there in a forest today. Then we use also AI to select reference regions to then track the additionality of an intervention. So if you're conserving a forest or restoring a forest, you want to see the addition of regeneration and carbon that you are producing versus a comparable area where there is an intervention. So we built an AI to do that automatically.
I've seen with my own eyes the effects of positive interventions. To give you an example, there's a series of reforestation projects that we're doing outside of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil where uh trees have been planted for the last 15 years and the rain is starting to come back and this is what you know people are observing on the region that as a result of the bigger trees, new rains and of course more biodiversity. So nature is resilient. It comes back and it heals ecosystems. We can benefit from more open data from satellite data to LAR data to ground data sitting on companies, universities.
If that data were to open, all the players that are working on processing the data and coming out with planetary insights can benefit and therefore humanity can benefit. If if I could have a wish of what data to have access, I would say airborne LAR data. There is a lot of LAR data that has been collected by airplanes flying above forest worldwide and that's what we use to train our algorithms combining satellite data with LAR airborne data which allows us to uh improve the accuracy of our predictions. I would love to have all that data in a commons not just for us but for everybody else working on the space.
It's important to keep in mind that everything is cyclical. the importance of keep working decidedly even when what you're building is out of fashion even when it seems that those in power don't care for what's important and it might feel discouraging or disempowering but I think that these are the moments in which we especially need to step up and keep working decidedly because history is long and impact of what we do today can go into long into the future [Music]