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AUSTIN, TX. February 1, 2023 – In response to the need for fairer, more effective climate action, KUNGFU.AI has partnered with the environmental conservation company Savimbo to help smallfarmers conserve endangered rainforest using artificial intelligence. The partnership is designed to address an increasing need for local engagement in rainforest climate action and carbon markets.
Savimbo supports smallfarmers living in tropical forests that control 25 percent of the world’s carbon. These populations are often digitally underrepresented, which prevents them from engaging in climate projects. Savimbo makes direct monthly micropayments to the smallfarmers for the protection and reforestation of private land they own.Then Savimbo sells carbon credits internationally for shared profits.
Savimbo uses off-grid photo capture so farmers can show that forests are still intact under the canopy, then automates this on-the-ground monitoring with ML-analysis so farmers can get paid. The partnership with KUNGFU.AI will create computer vision models to automatically measure the carbon load of jungle, allowing the farmers to be paid more quickly.
Machine-learning enables automation and scale of smallfarmer accounts so they can form collectives, reduce middlemen, and compete economically against large logging corporations who are overrepresented in the carbon-credit market.
“It’s just like fair-trade coffee,” says CEO and founder of Savimbo Drea Burbank, MD “Before fair-trade labels no one really cared how their coffee was grown.Well, that changed, and the carbon-credit market can too.”
AI and ML were the best solution to Savimbo’s desire to utilize trustless methods of tracking growth and reforestation. With these technologies made available in a remote region of the forest, new data can be efficiently generated and tracked, making it ideal for the certification of credits by a validation/verification body.
KUNGFU.AI provided the best solution for Savimbo’s need for trustless methods of tracking growth and reforestation. By using AI and ML in remote areas, new data can be captured and analyzed over long periods of time, making it ideal for carbon credit certification.
The KUNGFU.AI and Savimbo project advances machine-learning science with a unique dataset. There are very few image datasets of native Amazonian jungle captured from the ground. Currently scientists use metrics like the diameter of trees at breast height to assess carbon density but this is most commonly done with tape-measure.
KUNGFU.AI’s computer vision model is unique in its ability to assess the density and diameter of trees from photographs captured by the farmers.
“KUNGFU.AI has a long-standing commitment to using AI for good, so the opportunity to partner with Savimbo in this important mission is incredibly exciting for us,” said Stephen Straus, managing director, KUNGFU.AI. “We believe that pairing AI’s incredible power with the work Savimbo is doing will result in significant benefits for smallfarmers and our environment.”
Savimbo was founded by, and for, indigenous small farmers who were frustrated that sustained local action in the Columbian Amazon failed to receive any international development funds. “Most projects try to go through major cities to get conservation projects executed,” said the CEO and founder of Savimbo, Dr. Drea Burbank. “But tropical forests are remote, and often poorly served by their central governments. You’ve got to work directly with rural populations if you want the deforestation to stop.”
About KUNGFU.AI
KUNGFU.AI is the leading AI consultancy. We strategically partner with clients on large cycles of change and innovation to help them compete and lead in the age of AI. We provide strategy, engineering, and operations services to achieve AI-centric transformation. For more information, visit kungfu.ai.
About Savimbo
Savimbo is a US-based B-corp that uses high-tech solutions to enable smallfarmers in tropical forests to sell fair-trade carbon credits on the international market. It launched in 2022 and achieved rapid success on the ground — stopping deforestation immediately in the formerly-intractable Putumayo region. Savimbo’s credits are currently in pre-sales and due to achieve final certification with international validators later this year. Today, consumers can subscribe to be matched with an individual farmer and reduce their carbon footprint - or just support biodiversity in the region. Savimbo was founded by, and for, indigenous smallfarmers in the Colombian Amazon with a mission to employ 1 billion smallfarmers in ten years to clean the world’s air. To learn more, please visit www.savimbo.com.
For more information about Savimbo, please contact:
Drea Burbank, MD ops@savimbo.com
For more information about KUNGFU.AI, please contact:
Jennifer Trou, Director of Marketing, jennifer.trou@kungfu.ai
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