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This episode is brought to you by Ambetter Health. Group health insurance can put businesses in a tough position. If you're a business owner, a CFO or an HR leader, this is probably going to sound familiar. It's fall and you find out your group health insurance premium will be more expensive next year, maybe by a lot. And as usual, you have to pick one carrier and a few plans for all of the employees. But they each have different medical needs, different budgets and different preferences for doctors. Plus, the carrier's network might not be strong where all employees live. Fortunately, there's a new approach. It's called an Ichra or Ichra and it's a game changer. ICHRAs make costs predictable with stable pre tax contributions and a larger risk pool. And they make health plans personal because employees can buy any plan that fits their needs from any carrier. You choose how much to contribute. They choose what works for them. It's about time, right for coverage you control, plan on and ichra. Learn more@ambetterhealth.com Ichra this episode is brought to you by LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, work rarely stops. When the day ends, your business is always on. And when it's time to hire, you need a partner who's just as committed. That's where LinkedIn jobs comes in. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes hiring simple. Post your job for free and share it with your network. Their new feature even helps write job descriptions and gets your posting in front of the right candidates with deep insights. Want more reach? Promoted jobs get three times more qualified applicants. Here's what matters. Quality. Based on LinkedIn data, 72% of small businesses using LinkedIn said that it's helped them find high quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring and find your next great hire today. Post your job for free@LinkedIn.com TTD that's LinkedIn.com TTD to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. This episode is sponsored by Framer. If you've ever tried to build a website and felt boxed in by templates, you're not alone. Most no code tools promise flexibility but end up delivering compromise. That's where Framer comes in. Framer already built the fastest way to publish beautiful production ready websites. And it's now redefining how we design for the web with the recent launch of Design Pages, a free canvas based design tool. Framer is more than a site builder, it's a true all in one design platform. From social assets to campaign visuals to vectors and icons, all the way to a live site. Framer is where ideas go live, start to finish. Framer stands above the others because it's not just a site builder. Framer is a true design tool that also publishes professional production ready sites ready to design, iterate and publish all in one tool. Start creating for free@framer.com design and use code TED for a free month of Framer Pro. That's framer.com design promo code TED framer.com design promo code Ted rules and restrictions may apply. You're listening to TED Talks Daily where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. I don't know about you, but I'll admit that I'd be nowhere without the GPS I pull up on my phone every time I get in my car. Maps are invaluable for so many reasons, but did you know they're also helping in the fight against deforestation? In this talk, land reformer Tasso Acevedo reveals how the collaborative mapping initiative Map Biomas has stitched together 40 years of satellite images into near real time courtroom ready evidence. Turning Brazil's once invisible deforestation into bright undeniable pixels. It's led to real large scale results in saving our planet's lung.
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20, 40, 68, 100 in every second of the last 12 months, almost 20 trees were cut down in the Amazon. See, deforestation and degradation is a kind of a disaster for the only country in the world that is named after a tree. Brazil is the fifth largest greenhouse gas emitter in the planet, but different from the top four. The bulk of our emissions do not come from burning fossil fuels. It actually comes from the way we use the land. That's 75% of our emissions. The majority of that results from forests being cutting down. You see, tropical forests are like the lungs of the earth. You heard something like that before, right? When we cut them down, they essentially exhalate the carbon that have been stored for over many decades and they no longer exist to absorb the carbon and to maintain the evapotranspiration that keeps the cooling system of the planet. In 2024, the countries with the largest areas of tropical forests, like Brazil, Peru, Congo, Indonesia, lost an area of forest the size of Rwanda. This forest has been converted to pasture croplands, urban areas, mining and also suffering degradation from logging, increased droughts and wildfires. So we need to fight this degradation. And in order to to do so, we have to understand what's happening on the ground. So digital mapping can be a key role on that, because maps, maps have power, but only if you can understand really what's going on on the ground. So global satellite technology allow us to see the world in the palm of our hands. But these are just images. In order to understand what's happening with the land use, you need to capture the context of what we are seeing, so we can understand the transformations across the time, and then we can act. Until very recently, a detailed map like that for an entire country like Brazil was almost impossible to make because it was too costly and too slow to produce. So back in 2015, we put together a group of experts in the remote sensing, computer science and language to reinvent the way we do. We produce and publish maps. We call it Mapioma's network. And now we can produce 40 years of map in six months. We do it by creating a mosaic of all the existing satellite image that we have for every year since 1985. Then we apply machine learning algorithms that allow us to classify each pixel and make a layer for every land use class that we want to map, like forest, mangrove, cropland, and water. Then we put all those layers together and produce a time series with one integrated map for each year. Now we have this kind of time machine where you can see every pixel and see the history of those pixels of 30 by 30 meters that are 9.6 billion of them. That makes up Brazil. Now we can see the history of everywhere in the country in any time on the last four decades. But how this could lead to change. Have you ever crossed the red light and receive a penalty by email showing the license plate of your car? Yeah. So something very similar can be done with deforestation using remote sensing. Every time there is a deforestation detected in Brazil, we use high resolution satellite imagery to validate precisely when and where the deforestation have occurred. Then we cross this information with the land cover maps, the registry of the land properties, the catalog of protected areas, and even the authorizations for clear cut, so we can produce very detailed reports. In 2018, all the environmental agencies in Brazil together produced less than 1,000 reports in one year. Last year in Mapiomas, we produced 2,000 of those reports per week. Those reports have a level of granularity and precision that can literally be used on the court of law. So in fact, between 2019 and 2024, the actions from the environmental agencies in Brazil against illegal deforestation increased from 5 to 54% of all deforestation. It's also happening on fires. So in the last two years, the major banks in Brazil denied $1.5 billion on finance for 30,000 farms that have deforestation detected by Mapiomas. And this money went to a more sustainable operations. So this, together with several other actions, allows Brazil to decrease the amount of deforestation in the Amazon by 54% on the last two years, Which save all of us of 500 million tons of CO2 emissions. So this goes much beyond deforestation. In fact, in the Last year, over 600,000 users access our data and apply on hundreds of applications, like, for example, preventing tropical disease, regulating the use of water, assessing climate change impacts, designing soil conservation practices, and protecting indigenous land rights. Illegal gold mining is a huge problem in the Amazon. It destroys the land, it pollutes the water and poisons indigenous people. Back in 2023, the Brazilian government decided to take action to remove 30,000 gold miners from indigenous lands. And one of the key strategies to do so was to shut down the airstrips that were close to the mines in remote areas, so the miners could not take the gold out of the forest. So they have to leave. So in order to do so, you have to find out where are those airstrips? Right. So in just three weeks, our team was able to find, find out and map almost 3,000 airstrips across the entire Amazon, which is an area the size of Europe. So as of today, the number of gold miners in indigenous lands have dropped 90%. So none of that will be possible if we're not applying a kind of collaborative approach. So Mapioma's network is a group of over 100 organizations working across South America and Indonesia. Now, with the support of that community, through the Audacious Project, we aim to increase our reach to cover 70% of the world's tropical forest by 2030. We believe that this, the ability and the power to produce locally your maps for action should be present on every tropical country. And then we can exchange the sounds of destruction by the sounds of life.
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That was Tasso Acevedo at the TED Countdown Summit in Nairobi, Kenya in 2025. This ambitious idea is part of the audacious project, Ted's Initiative to Inspire and fund global change. Learn more@audaciousproject.org if you're curious about Ted's curation, find out more@ted.com curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This talk was fact checked by the TED research team and produced and edited by our team. Michael Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Greene, Lucy Little and Tansika Sangmarnivong. This episode was mixed by Christopher Faizy Bogan. Additional support from Emma Tobner and Daniela Balaurazo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening. TED Talks Daily is sponsored by Capital One. In my house, we subscribe to everything music, tv, even dog food. And it rocks. Until you have to manage it all. Which is where Capital One comes in. Capital One credit card holders can easily track, block or cancel recurring charges right from the Capital One mobile app at no additional cost. With one sign in, you can manage all your subscriptions all in one place. Learn more@capitalone.com subscriptions terms and conditions apply.
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