As countries around the world begin to either propose or enforce zero-deforestation regulations, companies are coming under growing pressure to prove that their products are free of deforestation. But this is often a far from straightforward process. Take palm oil, for instance. Its journey from plantations, most likely in Indonesia or Malaysia, to store shelves in the form of shampoo, cookies or a plethora of other goods, is a long and convoluted one. In fact, the cooking oil or cosmetics we use might contain palm oil processed in several different mills, which in turn may have bought the raw palm fruit from several of the many thousands of plantations. For companies that use palm oil in their products, tracing and tracking its origins through these obscure supply chains is a tough task. Often it requires going all the way back to the plot level and checking for deforestation. However, these plots are scattered over vast areas across potentially millions of locations, with data being in various states of digitization and completeness. “We need to be able to trace these plots to the facilities that ultimately are used for processing the crop into commodities which are sold in one of these regulated-demand markets,” Leo Bottrill, CEO of MapHubs, a technology company that uses satellite data to map logging, told Mongabay in a video interview. “If we don’t have a way to reconcile these things, these laws are not going to be able to work.” Palmoil.io, a web-based monitoring platform that Bottrill…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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