INPE (Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais)

node · earth

Brazil's national space research institute, based at Sao Jose dos Campos in Sao Paulo state, and the reason the Amazon has a deforestation record at all. Since 1988 it has produced PRODES, an annual wall-to-wall map of clear-cut deforestation across the Legal Amazon, and since 2004 DETER, a near-real-time alert system that flags new clearance within days for enforcement rather than for statistics. The institutional decision that gives the programme its weight is that the data is published openly and in full. That has an uncomfortable corollary, demonstrated in 2019 when the institute's director was dismissed after publicly defending DETER figures that the federal government disputed: an agency that publishes inconvenient numbers about its own country is periodically in political trouble for doing so, and the credibility of the record depends on it continuing anyway.