[Chimpanzee calls and forest sounds]
GOODALL: For me, storytelling
has always been the way to reach the heart. The stories that you can tell around
the images, along with the images make something very,
very powerful.
TEXT-ON-SCREEN: For 50 years NASA satellites like Landsat have been measuring dramatic changes in the world’s forests.
PINTEA: Science and technologies,
especially satellite imagery, are absolutely essential
because people's livelihoods, natural resources
and biodiversity are connected to each other.
Satellite imagery are our eyes in the sky,
providing those insights and up to date information.
VILLAGE LEADER: [speaks in local language]
TEXT-ON-SCREEN: Goodall’s Tacare program is a community-led approach helping both people and the environment
Satellite imagery has been used as a tool in their conservation efforts.
GOODALL: Going around the villages at the beginning of our Tacare program,
helping the villagers understand the importance of conservation
and what the deforestation was actually doing to harm them.
I will never forget when Lilian and I went to one of these villages
and he’d acquired one of these huge satellite imagery maps,
and we laid it out and the villagers were sitting around it
and their excitement was absolutely fantastic.
There was one woman saying,
That's the tree where I put my baby when I'm working in the fields.
And another man was saying, now we can see our sacred sites,
this tree and this rock.
And I remember one woman
and she said, well, I used to do my farming on this hillside.
And she pointed to it and she said, But then all the trees went away.
And there was this terrible landslide which showed on the map you could see
where the mud had slid down and there was no vegetation left on either side.
So she said, Now I understand.
Now I know that it's worth walking a whole extra hour in the morning
to get to a place where I can cultivate the land without causing
this terrible destruction of the environment.
MWANANG’OMBE: Tacare gives me hope.
The way it gives me hope is it is changing lives
and it is also empowering the local voices.
You find they are people they call themselves
forest guardians, friends of forest.
There are people who are becoming, you know, tree planting groups.
PINTEA: More than 80% of biodiversity
are in the hands of indigenous people and local communities across the world.
In Africa on average,
more than 65% land tenure is in the hands of local communities.
So if we want to achieve conservation impact and address the climate change,
we have to work with local communities and not only engage them but empowers them
to own and drive decision making in their landscapes.
GOODALL: Well, the Tacare approach began
when I flew over the Gombe area.
I flew over an area which in 1960 was part of the equatorial forest
belt that stretched right across Equatorial Africa to the west coast.
By the late ‘80s, I flew over in a small plane
and I looked down and I saw the tiny island of forests
Gombe National Park is very small, surrounded by bare hills.
As you know, I
spent many, many years studying chimpanzees.
When I began, there was probably between one and two
and I'd say closer to 2 million.
And today, 100,000 to 300 and a bit
thousand is all that's left.
Many of them are in fragmented environments,
isolated genetically and have little chance of survival.
So they are highly endangered.
And if we don't take action, then they will become
extinct.
PINTEA: The NASA satellite data
helped us understand what does it mean to be a chimp?
It helps us understand where to protect them.
NASA's supports
launches and maintains and manages a constellation of different satellites,
and some of them going all the way back to 1972.
By providing this data to the conservation community.
it helps us continuously monitor the chimpanzee habitats.
The chimpanzee
habitat suitability model develop with support from NASA,
and The University of Maryland, includes more than a dozen variables directly
extracted from Landsat satellite imagery, and it includes NDVI.
It includes percent tree canopy cover.
It includes tree heights.
Using conservation standards, approach and dashboards,
we take those models and turn them into habitat health indicators,
into actionable information people on the ground can actually work with,
and the conditions of the forest can change quite rapidly due
to illegal logging, mining or any other threats.
So this information is updated in near real time
so the conservation decisionmakers can see the individual threats affecting
chimpanzee habitats from village to national scales
and across the entire chimpanzee range in Africa.
And this NASA data helps identify areas under threat of illegal
logging or fire damage, where local managers
could be deployed to mitigate the threat. In addition, mobile apps enable community
members to become involved in not just tracking changes in their habitat,
but to be active in enforcing the protection of their village
forest reserves from degradation.
The community leaders have even used this data to inform
their village land use planning. Voluntarily moving farms away from areas where forest
restoration would lead to the greatest gain for watersheds and people.
GOODALL: It works both ways.
Sometimes you show a lush forest and then you show how a few years later
it's devastated.
There's just a few burnt stumps.
But on the other hand,
there are other images which show you a devastated landscape.
And then five years later, trees coming back, regeneration, new hope, new life.
So the stories that you can tell around the images,
along with the images, make something very, very powerful.
And you need both to make the kind of impact that we need to make today
to help people understand the devastation we've caused.
But to give them hope that we can turn things around.
And that's what these satellite images show.
So clearly.
MWANANG’OMBE: I'm convinced
that we have planted a seed that is going to spread.
And this is a very good way of trying to ensure our contribution
to the mother planet.
GOODALL: My future is a future where
technology is married to compassion and love.
TEXT-ON-SCREEN: Video footage courtesy Jane Goodall Productions. Conservation dashboards created with support from NASA, The University of Maryland, Esri, Maxar, and the US Agency for International Development.