AI and forests: what lies ahead?

Biodiversity and climate change are the two defining issues of our age with respect to environmental protection.

Forests host 80% of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity and constitute a natural source of carbon capture and storage. They are also wonderful natural sources of clean water, regulators of weather, and protect against natural disasters, as well as being a source of shelter and renewable energy. 

But forests are rapidly disappearing as a result of deforestation and degradation.

This is why the EU has given great importance to forests in the European Green Deal. The European Commission has pledged to prepare a new Forest Strategy to restore damaged and depleted forests, improve the quality and quantity of European forests, and avoid creating deforestation outside the EU.

The scientific community, private sector and NGOs are also deploying efforts to counter these issues and have got together to identify the most advanced tools - many of them based on Artificial Intelligence – to spearhead the fight against deforestation and enable better research, monitoring and data collection.

This event, supported by Huawei in partnership with the Rainforest Connection and GeSI, focused on how make use of such tools to overcome these challenges. 

For more information, visit the organiser’s site