Satellite launches on mission to ‘weigh’ the world’s forests

illuminem summarises for you the essential news of the day. Read the full piece on The Washington Post or enjoy below:

🗞️ Driving the news: The European Space Agency successfully launched its Biomass satellite on Tuesday aboard a Vega-C rocket from French Guiana, initiating a groundbreaking mission to map global forest biomass
• Using a unique P-band radar, the satellite will penetrate dense forest canopies to measure the amount of wood — and thus carbon — stored in the world’s forests, offering an unprecedented view of these ecosystems’ role in mitigating climate change

🔭 The context: The mission is the first to use space-based P-band radar, previously restricted to military use, to globally quantify forest biomass
• Past estimates have relied on localized, labor-intensive field measurements and extrapolations, leaving significant gaps, particularly in tropical regions where half of the world’s trees are located
• Existing satellite missions — like NASA’s GEDI and Japan’s L-band radar system — lack the capacity to accurately map below-canopy forest structures at global scale

🌍 Why it matters for the planet: Forests act as a major carbon sink, absorbing vast amounts of CO₂, yet their exact carbon-storing capacity remains uncertain
• As climate change and deforestation degrade these ecosystems, accurate data is essential for international climate policymaking, carbon accounting, and conservation financing
• This mission can enable more credible, data-driven decisions to protect forests and monitor restoration commitments under frameworks like REDD+

⏭️ What's next: The Biomass satellite will orbit Earth 15–16 times daily at 413 miles altitude over a five-year mission, starting with tropical regions where data scarcity is most acute
• Scientists are set to calibrate its outputs using field data to refine global biomass estimates
• Initial datasets will be available to mission scientists within days, with the first public release expected in about a year, potentially shaping future climate agreements and forest finance mechanisms

💬 One quote: “If you’re going to start basing policy and making international agreements around what we should be doing to protect forests... then you need to have numbers that are both credible and that people will sign up to,” — Matt Disney, environmental scientist at University College London

📈 One stat: The Amazon rainforest alone is estimated to store 123 billion tons of carbon — equivalent to more than 10 years of global CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels

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