News from the Field

It is the world’s greatest and most important tropical rain forest. The Amazon, which stretches across northern Brazil and other parts of Latin America accounts for nearly 50 percent of the globe's remaining tropical greenery. At a time of unprecedented climate change, it plays a major modifying influence on weather patterns, acting as a giant 'lung' for the human race, controlling both oxygen and carbon dioxide patterns.

The Amazon rain forest

But the Amazon, home of ancient civilians, vast mineral and plant resources, site of countless Hollywood movies, has been under threat from encroaching civilization and globalization for decades.

In one year alone it lost more than eighteen thousand square kilometers, or some nine times the size of Tokyo.

The Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) has been participating in efforts to halt the widespread destruction, as part of its global commitment to preserve the world's environment from further destruction.

A Japanese expert on remote sensing and GIS, Manabu Kawaguchi, recently worked with the environmental section of the Brazilian Federal Police in the capital of Brasilia and currently has undertaken a second mission to the country, working with several organizations concerned with Amazon monitoring to explore the possibility of employing sophisticated Japanese satellite imaging equipment to track the ongoing human impact on the forests.

JICA also sent three Brazilian specialists—two environmental crime experts from the Federal Police Department and a remote sensing expert from the environmental agency IBAMA to Japan for advanced study, including use of the latest remote sensing technology, the Japanese land observation satellite, ALOS as well as criminal identification systems used by the Japanese police.

Workers in the remote sensing center's analysis section.

At a heavily attended seminar , the IBAMA participant, Humberto Mesquita Jr. said that with ALOS would great help efforts to track illegal encroachments in the forest, particularly unauthorized logging.

"Persistent cloud cover in the Amazon is where we have the most difficulty," he said, "and the ALOS will help us solve that problem."