Georeferencing technology is revolutionizing the capacity of South American countries to address deforestation. Historically, the primary source of information about land use and land cover was one-off maps of specific biomes without a comprehensive geographic perspective or a historical view of changes over time. Launched in Brazil in 2015, the MapBiomas network designed and implemented a methodology for generating comprehensive maps to show annual changes in land use. The network expanded over the last 10 years, covering all of South America by the end of 2024 and marking an important milestone for land use oversight in the region. 

Fundación Avina helped nurture the social capital that is at the core of MapBiomas. Since the early 2000s, we have been co-investing, with the Skoll Foundation and other allies, in forest transparency in the Pan-Amazon and South American Chaco regions, strengthening local partner institutions' expertise in georeferencing systems. Today, many of these organizations are key members of the MapBiomas network in their respective countries. Fundación Avina also facilitated spaces to build shared agendas for MapBiomas, including the first workshop where the methodology was designed in 2015. In addition, we supported the formation of Red Amazónica de Información Socioambiental Georreferenciada (RAISG), a consortium of civil society organizations from the Amazon countries, which was crucial to expanding MapBiomas beyond Brazil. Since 2024, Avina has supported the network's efforts to expand to other areas of the global South. 

Thanks to MapBiomas, over 100 local organizations —including NGOs, universities, government agencies, and technology companies from every country in the region—now have the capacity to produce exhaustive maps of their own territories using an innovative methodology that combines local knowledge, collaboration, and state-of-the-art technology like satellite imagery and artificial intelligence. This enables each country to autonomously generate essential information about land use and land cover, a fundamental component to conserving natural resources, designing public policies, and implementing sustainable agricultural practices, among other applications. This collaborative approach has also encouraged new dynamics of collaboration and coordination in favor of care for the environment.