Could AI save the Amazon rainforest?

Conservationists in the Brazilian Amazon are using a new tool to predict the next sites of deforestation - and it may prove a gamechanger in the war on logging

It took just the month of March this year to fell an area of forest in Triunfo do Xingu equivalent to 700 football pitches. At more than 16,000 sq km, this Environmental Protection Area (APA) in the south-eastern corner of the Brazilian Amazon, in the state of Para, is one of the largest conservation areas in the world. And according to a new tool that predicts where deforestation will happen next, it's also the APA at highest risk of even more destruction.

The tool, PrevisIA, is an artificial intelligence platform created by researchers at environmental nonprofit Imazon. Instead of trying to repair damage done by deforestation after the fact, they wanted to find a way to prevent it from happening at all.