Seeing the world for the trees

摘要

Peru's forests cover 72m hectares of the country (278,000 square miles). That is three times the area of Britain. And Peru intends to hold on to its greenery. In 2000 its deforestation rate was 250,000 hectares a year. By 2005 that figure was down to 150,000. This year, according to Antonio Brack Egg, the country's environment minister, it will be 90,000. In 2021, if all goes well, it will be zero. To make sure things stay on course, Dr Brack says, the government needs to spend more than $100m a year on high-resolution satellite pictures of its billions of trees. But he hopes that a computing facility developed by the Planetary Skin Institute (psi), a not-for-profit organisation set up by Cisco Systems, a large computing firm, and America's space agency, nasa, might help cut that budget.