On Earth Day 2020, exactly one year ago today, Reforestum joined our Global Social Entrepreneurship Program, with an ambition to connect and empower citizens and organizations under the common goal of reversing climate change by collaboratively protecting and restoring the Earth’s forest ecosystems.
To monitor the certified forest projects that their users support around the globe, Reforestum needed mentoring and engineering resources to implement machine learning algorithms analyzing satellite imagery, starting with large-scale conservation projects. Microsoft’s technology and resources were the perfect match to help support this mission through the Microsoft for Startups program.
For the past year, Reforestum has been working as part of the Microsoft for Startups Global Social Entrepreneurship program, training their deep learning models powered by Microsoft Azure to assess in near-real time the carbon stocks of projects in their portfolio. Their ambition is to release a first prototype of their monitoring system onto their platform in the Summer, and to collaborate with Microsoft and other partners to integrate more functionalities as the platform adds more projects. Such a suite of Monitoring Reporting and Verification (MRV) tools is needed to tackle some long-standing issues known in carbon markets.
Today, on a day of particular significance, Reforestum is proud to announce that they have made good progress in keeping their promise. As a symbol of their progress, they have just launched a new forest, the fourth project to be offered in their platform, the second planted in Spain and, more importantly, the first that brings together individuals and companies in the fight against climate change. To make this unique, they ran an open online event to engage their community.
On this Earth Day 2021, Microsoft for Startups is proud to celebrate inspiring social impact startups like Reforestum and accompany them on their journey to accelerate the work restoring natural ecosystems at the scale required to address climate change, as they keep working hard to build a better world.
