How tech can curb deforestation in Brazil’s Cerrado

While forest destruction in the Brazilian Amazon makes headlines worldwide, the country’s lesser known Cerrado region is the biome which actually suffers the most from deforestation. Encompassing what is now Brazil’s soy belt, the Cerrado tropical savanna continues to see its trees cut down to make way for grain plantations. And this agriculture and disorderly urban occupation provokes its own environmental damage, threatening endemic Brazilian animal species and putting major water sources at risk.

The Cerrado irrigates some 40 percent of Brazil and feeds eight out of the country’s 12 main water basins. It makes up over 90 percent of the critical São Francisco basin and almost one-half of the Parana River basin — which supplies the massive Itaipu hydroelectric dam on the Brazil-Paraguay border.

According to the most recent figures available, deforestation in the Cerrado rose by 7.9 percent between August 2020 and July 2021, reaching a total destroyed area of 8,531 square kilometers — the worst...