SPMJ Comunicação supported the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) at the Futurecom 2023, the biggest technology event in Latin America. Tereza Carvalho, an IEEE member, took the opportunity to highlight the Amazon 4.0 project on technologies for environment protection which increase the life quality of Amazon forest communities.

Applying technologies such as Blockchain and IoT, the Amazon 4.0 project aims to develop economic activities in the forest for local communities through educational actions and creative laboratories.

On 10/4, 10:30 am, in the Industrial Applications Arena at Futurecom 2023, Tereza Cristina Melo de Brito Carvalho, member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) –  the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity  – and electrical engineer and PhD from the University from São Paulo, gives a lecture on the Amazon 4.0 project, a technological solution that seeks to make extractivism in the Amazon more beneficial to local communities, and take advantage of the region’s biodiversity to offer a better quality of life for its residents. In order to deliver environmental solutions for collective well-being, the proposal is to make the Cacau-Cupuaçu production chain traceable through technologies such as Blockchain and IoT, allowing a better distribution of the gains obtained in this activity.

“The actions of the Amazon 4.0 program use technology and education to ensure that the Amazon, the largest tropical forest in the world, is a protagonist in the bioeconomy, which, in a decade, should represent 2.7% of the GDP of the richest countries, according to projections by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)”, says the IEEE member. “Furthermore, the potential of the bioeconomy for the country is immense, as pointed out in the global macroeconomic study “Changes in the Global Value of Ecosystem Services”, according to which the standing Amazon forest could yield up to R$7 trillion annually to Brazil.”

How to stimulate local communities
To achieve these goals, the Amazon 4.0 program developed Amazon Creative Laboratories (LCAs), mobile laboratories in which scientists and people from traditional and indigenous peoples work in partnership to create products from the processing of raw materials from the Amazon, and then transform them into products with high added value due to their quality and traceability.

“This involves training actions on available natural resources, carried out directly in local communities, but also adding the traditional knowledge of these people to develop innovative and disruptive solutions, stimulating the bioeconomy and indigenous peoples, in addition to keeping the forest preserved”, concludes Tereza Carvalho.