Driving a transition to sustainable trade through data transparency
2022-10-02 , EMACS
Language: English

Our daily consumption of food and other commodities has complex ripple effects across the globe. The opacity of international trade masks the drivers of deforestation and the destruction of precious ecosystems. In this interactive session I will demonstrate how the Trase initiative can counteract these forces by creating transparency from data on a global scale.


Trase is a data-driven transparency initiative that is revolutionising our understanding of the trade and financing of commodities driving deforestation worldwide. I will being by introducing the Trase initiative and the key insights that we have found relating to how international trade in soy, beef, wood pulp and other commodities affects the Amazon and other precious ecosystems in Indonesia, Africa and South America.

I will then present Trase's data APIs and point-and-click data products at https://www.trase.earth/. These freely-available products have been designed to support civil society to take practical steps to address deforestation and drive a transition to sustainable trade.

Trase needs help in ensuring that our data and our products are meeting the needs of civil society and we need feedback from the community. I will run a workshop in which people will use our data to run through some guided exercises. The intent is to inspire uptake to empower existing initiatives to use our data and our tools to tackle deforestation, and create a dialog to help us improve them.

Trase is a partnership between the Stockholm Environment Institute and Global Canopy. Our major donors are the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Norway's International Climate and Forest Initiative (NICFI) and the Quadrature Climate Foundation.

I am a mathematician and software engineer. I joined Trase in 2019 and lead the development of software tools to map commodity supply chains.