The main driver of climate change is greenhouse gas emissions forests are one of our ways out they are like the lungs of the planet .They are big climate regulators at a global scale july23 1972.My work has always been about monitoring the land surface and forest thrusting outward into space we gain new perspective on ourselves since 1972 till now lands at has been tracking and taking pictures of the earth's surface circling the earth it offers an ideal means to monitor change I mean it's hard to imagine how we used to do this but for the first 20 years of the mission people were tracking the land surface on essentially hard copy photos and drawing on them and in 2008 the us government says it's open free of charge and accessible over the internet millions of images automatically it's just this huge leap in capability it was only then where we saw the whole planet and when you see the whole it was a bit of a revelation and yeah the alarm bells go off these warm orangey tones that's forest disturbance that means forest was removed
we didn't know that was going on many places we can go anywhere and see
actual force being cleared
it usually starts with logging rainforests are cleared and burned they then replace it with soybeans rubber pasture for cattle. But one of the big drivers is palm oil palm oil is like a magical fruit we all have palm oil in our houses right now it's found in almost every good you can think about it's in soaps it's in 
shampoo it's in chocolate it's in bread it's even in crisps what we're doing accidentally and inadvertently is actually causing deforestation in other countries because our demand for this product .That means the natural system is not working habitats are disappearing but also when these high carbon stock forests that are centuries old are cleared and burned co2 is added to the atmosphere those emissions go up and warm the planet when you look at our maps our results are showing that it's it's it's accelerating it almost looks like a contagion you know it looks like a disease across the planet i mean the ever increasing pattern if we continue this level of deforestation we'll take it all boom there goes the forest and our ability to mitigate climate change and turn the story around becomes really vanishingly small
Trees are now being cut down and burnt at such a rate that nearly a third of carbon dioxide emissions are caused by deforestation it sucks
I'm a pretty lighthearted optimistic but just looking at these data you're just looking at the stories it's like uh you know i'd like to see some evidence of really strong strong kind of unified political response that was more than an aspiration on a kind of piece of paper right that would be coo you
shampoo it's in chocolate it's in bread it's even in crisps what we're doing accidentally and inadvertently is actually causing deforestation in other countries because our demand for this product .That means the natural system is not working habitats are disappearing but also when these high carbon stock forests that are centuries old are cleared and burned co2 is added to the atmosphere those emissions go up and warm the planet
