Deforestation

Illegal logging is organised work. Companies push into protected territory on forged permits, ownership claims and transport papers, and they arrive with heavy machinery. A single truck or excavator cuts a road deep into the forest in very little time, and that road is permanent: it opens the area up for everything that follows.

The people defending that forest cannot be everywhere at once. Territories are vast, densely overgrown and hard to reach. Indigenous communities guard them with teams who patrol, gather evidence and confront intruders peacefully, and that approach works: where they find loggers, the work usually stops. But a patrol covers one route at a time, and the companies come back.

The tools for closing that gap all look backwards. Satellite imagery shows loss once the forest is already gone, days to weeks later and only when the cloud cover cooperates. Camera traps do record who drove in, but have to be read out by hand. Both deliver evidence for later. What the teams on the ground need is the message while the truck is still in the area, because that is the only moment intervention changes anything.

We place Instant Detect cameras along the access roads logging companies use. The moment a vehicle triggers one, the image goes out over satellite immediately: a photo, a location and a timestamp, in the hands of the guardians while the truck is still in the area.

Being seen turns out to matter as much as the evidence. In the Amazon, images from the first cameras were circulating through the community by WhatsApp on day one. Whoever drives into a protected area is no longer anonymous.

The work in Brazil is done with Treesistance, an Indigenous-led movement of Stichting Sinchi: thirteen Indigenous territories and more than one and a half million hectares of rainforest and cerrado, guarded by Forest Guardians. Installation and maintenance we build up together, towards a fully Indigenous technical team.