Gilberto Camara - Brazil's Fight Against Deforestation; Politics & Open Data - MBM#61

Minds Behind Maps

Gilberto Camara was the director of INPE, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research from 2005 to 2012, working there 35y in total and leading the use of satellite imagery to fight deforestation in Brazil, leading to what Nature declared “One of the biggest environmental wins of the 2000s”

Sponsor: OpenCage

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About Gilberto

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Shownotes

Note: Links to books are Amazon Affiliate links. I earn a small commission if you buy any of these books.

• Landsat 1
• MODIS
• Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s current president
• My interview with USGS’s former Director Barbara Ryan
• 1992 Rio declaration (particularly Article 10)
• BBC ‘Yes Minister’
• Nature article on Brazil deforestation initiatives
• Books & Podcast recommendations
  • The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi (Affiliate Link)
  • The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age by Manuel Castells (Affiliate Link)
  • Robin Cole’s satellite-image-deep-learning
  • Code & Other Laws of Cyberspace by Lawrence Lessig (Affiliate Link)
  • Techno-Feudalism by Yanis Varoufakis (Affiliate Link)

Timestamps

(00:00) - Introduction
(01:14) - Sponsor: OpenCage
(02:40) - Gilberto describes himself
(04:14) - Deforestation wasn't always a priority: Brazil in the 80s
(07:50) - INPE (Brazil's National Institute for Space Research)
(11:13) - Landsat
(23:15) - Forest Land doesn't have monetary value
(24:14) - Mapping Deforestation Doesn't Magically Solve Everything
(28:35) - Incentives
(38:06) - Open Data was the only way
(38:51) - Not everyone likes open data
(42:11) - The first real-time deforestation alert system
(46:43) - From data to actual enforcement
(55:15) - Avoiding False Positive Deforestation Alerts
(01:00:48) - Misunderstood Accuracy in Remote Sensing
(01:07:52) - The roles of current geospatial tools
(01:15:43) - Brazil made Landsat images openly available before the US
(01:20:31) - Getting Things Done
(01:33:51) - Private remote sensing companies
(01:49:50) - The right tool & the right data
(01:53:32) - Monetary motivations behind commercial GIS
(02:02:29) - The source(s) of innovation
(02:07:28) - Book/podcast recommendation
(02:12:56) - Opening just a tiny little last topic
(02:17:41) - Support my work on Patreon

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