umgrauemeio 1.5ºC

Wildfires are a global environmental disaster with a direct impact on climate change, human health, and biodiversity. It also brings billions of dollars in resource losses. 

Umgrauemeio (1.5ºC) solution support fire brigades to tackle wildfires in the early stages, providing a digital solution to detect wildfire, automatically, in its early stages providing tools to support the five firefighting operational milestones. 1-prevention, 2-detection, 3-communications, 4-mobilization, 5-combat planning. 

If humanity reaches net-zero emissions from every economic sector but did not avoid the growing emissions from wildfires, all the effort to cut emissions from the multiple economic sectors won't be enough to push us toward reaching Paris agreement goals to avoid temperature rising above 1.5ºC and consequent aggravation of mass extinction and environmental collapse. 

We are appling to attend the challenge "to preserve carbon-rich ecosystems and biodiversity hotspots in terrestrial fire-prone areas". Wildfires are one of the major causes of emissions on the planet, causes mass extinction of numerous species. In the last 2 years, wildfires around the world were the largest in intensity and CO2 emissions from the last 18 year. If those fires were prevented or detected in their early stages many lives would have been saved and huge amounts of CO2 would not be emitted. Scientists are taking emissions from wildfires to the center stage of the climate-related academic discussion collecting data related to the downward spiral composed of -> warmer world -> dryer and warmer fire-prone areas -> more wildfires -> dryer and warmer fire-prone areas -> warmer world.

https://insideclimatenews.org/...

https://www.researchgate.net/p...

https://esajournals.onlinelibr...

Umgrauemeio solution operates in Pantera® integrated software system.

Artificial intelligence algorithms work through computer vision integrated with high-resolution cameras, installed on top of towers to detect fire outbreaks within 3 minutes indicating the precise location of the fire event within the range of 70.000 hectares. The solution is scalable and the fire brigade management module can also be purchased independently. The module support ground operations, and analyzes the data provided by the fire brigade's allowing officials to increment prevention in future fire fighting operations, increasing overall safety, efficiency, loss, and emissions reductions, protecting life on land, human respiratory health, and natural and patrimonial resources. 

As the following articles show wildfires are a humanitarian issue aggravated by the Covid-19 pandemics. We are working with researchers and change-makers in order to accomplish long-term cultural changes. Despite the intentional fire, promoted by criminals after deforestation, the "cultural fires" also take place in traditional communities with the intent to clean prepare the soil for plantation or cattle. On some occasions, those fires lost control and accidentally spread into the forest agricultural border, which is dryer and more prone to fire than in the past, due to the aggravation of global warming. So in deep jungle projects, we are working with partners to teach new technics of soil management (fire-free) and supporting poor communities so they can prosper by keeping the forest "standing up". If we don't work towards social justice and eradication of poverty we won't reach climate justice or fulfill the SDG goals or avoid the scaling of catastrophic wildfires. 

Articles -

"Report indicates that deforestation-related fires were associated with a significant negative impact on public health in the Amazon region in 2019. This includes 2,195 hospitalizations due to respiratory illness attributable to the fires, according to the statistical analysis conducted by IEPS in partnership with IPAM and Human Rights Watch. Of these, 467 hospitalizations (21 percent) involved infants 0-12 months old, and 1,080 (49 percent) involved people 60 years old and over. The study found that patients spent a total of 6,698 days in the hospital in 2019 as a result of exposure to air pollution from fires."

https://www.hrw.org/report/202...

"Wildfires threaten lives directly, and wildfire smoke can affect us all. They spread air pollution not only nearby, but thousands of miles away—causing breathing difficulties in even healthy individuals, not to mention children, older adults and those with heart disease, diabetes, asthma, COPD and other lung diseases."

https://www.lung.org/blog/how-...

"Many individuals in rural areas, low-income neighborhoods, and immigrant communities do not have access to the resources necessary to pay for insurance, rebuilding, or continual investment in fire safety, thereby increasing their vulnerability to wildfire. These disparities became very clear after the 2017 wildfires in Sonoma County, California, where price gouging on rentals worsened an already dire housing shortage."

https://www.kqed.org/news/1170...

"Climate change increases the frequency with which some of these thresholds are crossed, extending the duration of the fire season and increasing the frequency of dry years. However, climate-related factors do not explain all of the complexity of global fire-regime changes, as altered ignition patterns (eg human behavior) and fuel structures (eg land-use changes, fire suppression, drought-induced dieback, fragmentation) are extremely important"

https://esajournals.onlinelibr...

"No single factor produces wildfires; rather, they occur when fire thresholds (ignitions, fuels, and drought) are crossed. Anomalous weather events may lower these thresholds and thereby enhance the likelihood and spread of wildfires. Climate change increases the frequency with which some of these thresholds are crossed, extending the duration of the fire season and increasing the frequency of dry years. However, climate-related factors do not explain all of the complexity of global fire-regime changes, as altered ignition patterns (eg human behavior) and fuel structures (eg land-use changes, fire suppression, drought-induced dieback, fragmentation) are extremely important"

https://www.who.int/health-top...

https://www.nature.com/article...

https://esajournals.onlinelibr..

We already sell our solution to the planted forest, agriculture, and mining sectors in Brazil, also protecting public/private nature reserves. Concerning our real-time fire mitigation solution, we have 70 towers in 9 states of Brazil covering more than 4MI hectares. The CO2 measurement  & report could be applied to any company in the world, from any sector, willing to protect forests in fire-prone forests around the world and add the achievable CO2 reduction goals to the public and move towards a net-zero economy. Last year we reached the milestone of US$ 1MI dollars revenue. 

CO2 emissions from wildfires were not been taken into the overall global emissions, only deforestation was taken into the account. 

Concurrently with our unique fire brigade management platform providing data to endorse operational efficiency we also developed a methodology to measure emissions from avoided wildfires concerning the implementation of an holistic and efficient firefighting integrated web. There is no other initiative in the world tackling wildfires while at the same time measures its environmental indicators. There is much to explore considering the impacts we want to provide and measure. Avoided CO2 emissions is just the begining. We have joined forces with biologists to measure biodiversity impact of fire affected areas using acoustic landscape sensors. The health and social impacts are also something we are looking at and how we can reduce respiratory issues, once the fire is contained in its early stages. we also want to measure the results of resources savings. 

We already sell our solution to the planted forest, agriculture, and mining sectors in Brazil, also protecting public/private nature reserves. Concerning our real-time fire mitigation solution, we have 70 towers in 9 states of Brazil covering more than 4MI hectares. We are scaling up fast and the more we grow more people we will indirectly impact. We don't have the exact number of people we impact, considering SDG 13, SDG 3, SDG 15, and SDG 8. That's why we want to deepen our research and social impact measurements.

We are affiliated with ONU's global compact initiative and applying to become a B-Corp. That trims our own act. We also prove ourselves in groups such as Sitawi and Fundação Don Cabral ( we changed our name - we were Sintecsy until the rebranding to 1.5ºC last April). 

25 fulltime staff

Our team is composed of forest and electrical engineers, data scientists, climate researchers, entrepreneurs, law specialists, marketing, innovation, human resources, and finances. The heads, which I'm part of, are diverse in skills with multifunctional capacities. When we changed our name from Sintecsys to 1.5ºC we wanted to bring our purpose to the front line of our name and work on our culture, internal processes, and societary models.

We are all open to change and aligned in our purposes. It is not a simple task, but we are evolving and learning from our mistakes with a constructive mindset. 

We changed our social status in order to build a partnership model and join the B-Corp initiative. We are a balanced group of people with diverse genders. Women are in leadership positions among the C level of our company. Minorities, people with disabilities also are on our team and we provide social benefits to all of them. 

Because it would be a dream come true to get involved with MIT due to the fact of the speed we may gain and the increment in our potential to solve criminal and catastrophic wildfires in Brazil and in other places of the world. 

We want to grow our positive impact at the same pace we improve and create new solutions for the emerging challenges our solution can cope with to mitigate. We are creating new solutions, integrating new technologies. We are starting our international endeavor in Portugal. So we need to raise our bar and learn from the people that lead us into new territories and new products and business models. 

We would like to partner with international climate researchers. Explore new monitoring technologies and possibilities that I don't even imagine existed.  

A.I, machine learning is the basis to predict and detect the climate challenges and improve firefighting operations and future actions.