Today’s world is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. Therefore, to thrive as a company in the 2020s, you need to be different than 20 years ago. You need the ability to adapt timely to a fast and unpredictably changing environment. Take, for example climate change, which will lead to resource scarcity of soft commodities if mitigation measures are not taken on time. Additionally, events influencing business decisions are not limited to local or regional scale anymore but increasingly global. As the proverb goes “finance eats strategy for breakfast”. You can add to that that climate change eats strategy for lunch, dinner and late night drinks.
One day you wake up and realise sustainability is not a liability anymore, but an asset. To benefit from this change, you need to be properly informed to make the right sourcing and investment decisions. To make the right decisions, you need data, you need discussion ready data.
Satelligence can provide that data. At global scale.
Satelligence exists to create meaningful impact by achieving sustainable agricultural commodity production with zero deforestation. Our mission is to help our customers thrive on a healthy planet.
To keep our planet healthy we must reduce environmental damage and social conflict by:
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Limiting agricultural expansion to suitable, sustainable areas (= risk monitoring),
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Increasing agricultural productivity in existing production areas (=performance monitoring), so that expansion to new areas is not needed.
Zero deforestation is possible. Our director, Niels Wielaard, wrote about developments that help us move towards zero deforestation already over a year ago.
At the moment, there is an information gap between what happens on the ground (plantations, deforestation, fires) and what is recorded in (accounting) records in supply chains and ultimately consumers that buy products made from these commodities. What we do at Satelligence is to fill the gap between producers and the supermarket (retail). Producers in soft commodity value chains like cocoa and oil palm are mainly smallholder farmers. The reasons our services are tailored so well to our clients problems are:
- We believe risk and performance issues in soft commodity value chains can only be solved with a holistic view; we are one of the few companies that map and monitor global soft commodity supply chains, and take into account environmental, social and political aspects that affect risk and performance;
- We are very close to our customers to deeply understand their day to day workflow and problems; we start designing solutions from the customer’s perspective, then find an optimal technological solution, not the other way around;
- We believe that to solve our customer’s problems it is crucial to understand the local context, our services take into account environmental, economical, social and political aspects of client facing issues: we have a high contextual intelligence.
- We use this holistic view, customer’s perspective and local context together with a best in class satellite image processing engine to provide our customers with the best solutions.
In a series of 7 blogs, of which this is the first, we will talk about how we at Satelligence help our clients become more sustainable and monitor risks in their supply chains These blogs focus on various aspects of our company and strategy:
- Change detection at global scale; how to build a processing engine that can ingest, process and disseminate vast amounts of satellite imagery at scale?
- Actionable information: how ground patrol teams use our data to protect Orangutan habitats in Sumatra, Indonesia;
- Validation and Accuracy; why our clients say our system is the best at detecting deforestation globally.
- Supply chain analysis: What are the drivers behind deforestation in the Ghanaian cocoa landscape?
- Prevent alert fatigue: how to make sure only relevant change gets detected by using basemaps;
- Multi-stakeholder approach: near real-time deforestation detection as conversation starter to shape local forest policies in Suriname.
The world becomes less predictable, so we have to learn to cope with change and adapt. Fortunately, with this change comes hope for more sustainable supply chains as companies join forces to battle deforestation.
Satelligence is your partner towards a sustainable future.