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Tropical forests are crucial for combating climate change. Yet in just 200 years, ~15% of global forest cover has been lost to agriculture, urbanisation, and industrialisation. Commitments to restoration are growing, but progress remains slow. What's missing is data: without real-time, reliable information, decision-makers are left reactive, and the communities most dependent on these forests bear the greatest cost. MapBiomas is making the invisible visible, so ecosystems can be protected, restored, and governed with evidence. Based on open and collaborative science, their network feeds a platform that integrates satellite imagery, machine learning, and cloud computing. All data, maps, methods, and codes are publicly available free of charge.
About the organisation
MapBiomas is a collaborative network of 700+ people in over 200 NGOs, universities, and technology companies that uses technology and on-ground insights to produce detailed maps on land cover and land-use change annually. Their data, analytical tools and images are helping governments and communities make better informed decisions about forests, water, fire and land use in general. With partners anchored in each country, they operate across 17 countries in South America, México, DRC, India and Indonesia, with data on land use spanning over 35 years. Their goal is to reveal the transformations of the territory - especially the brazilian one - through science, with precision, agility and quality, and make accessible knowledge about land cover and use, to pursue conservation and sustainable management of natural resources as a way to combat climate change.
Founded in 2015, in Brazil their maps have driven over $130 million in fines for deforesters, blocked over $1,5 billion in loans, and validated 500,000+ instances of deforestation across 10 million hectares. Looking ahead, MapBiomas' vision for 2030 is to create real-time data on land use and its changes in South & Central America, Mexico, and countries that hold at least 70% of the tropical forests. In 2023, the organization was awarded in the Collective Social Innovation category by the Schwab Foundation.
Tasso Azevedo
Founder
Ashoka Fellow, Founder - SEEG Network
Skoll, Schwab, TED Audacious, & Mulago awardee
Headquarters: Brazil
Geographies:
South America, Mexico, DRC, India and Indonesia
Domains:
Climate
Journey of Exponential Change
MapBiomas is a manifestation of multiple Societal Thinking principles:
Shared Open Assets: Providing detailed data, analytical tools, images on land cover and land-use change annually as well as all codes used, free of cost, including for commercial purpose.
Co-creation: Inviting people from across the globe to contribute to the maps
Societal Networks: Operating across several geographies and domains with diverse ecosystems partners from civil society, government and private sector anchored in each country.
Their central focus has been on how to induce more exponential scaling in their network in terms of how data is read, accessed, and consumed, evidenced by their goal to increase platform users exponentially.
MapBiomas is now evolving from a user-focused approach to optimizing for large language models (Claude, Gemini,, ChatGPT) to enhance discoverability and impact. This move positions MapBiomas as the definitive reference for land use information in AI systems, as the team recognized that achieving scale requires becoming the answer machines provide. The organization's current focus is on structuring MapBiomas so that learning, impact, and policy influence scale at the pace of AI and networks. Prototypes are underway to re-architect data publishing so LLMs treat it as the default global answer on land-use questions, and to build a "bank of AI agents" across their 700-person network to prototype rapid learning transfer. Early signals indicate these prototypes are helping MapBiomas move from intuitive scaling to intentional, codified exponential practice.
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