SMByC — Colombia's National Forest & Carbon Satellite Monitoring System

Established in 2012 under IDEAM (Instituto de Hidrología, Meteorología y Estudios Ambientales), in coordination with Colombia's Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, SMByC (Sistema de Monitoreo de Bosques y Carbono) is the country's official national forest-and-carbon monitoring platform.
The system applies a four-phase protocol — pre-processing, digital image processing, validation and reporting — using principal component analysis on Landsat imagery, supplemented by CBERS, RapidEye, ASTER and Sentinel-2 data where Landsat coverage is insufficient. It produces wall-to-wall national forest-cover change maps and four deforestation early-warning bulletins per year.
By 2017 SMByC had documented 27 years of change (1990-2017), including 6.7 million hectares of national forest loss and 783,899 hectares lost in 2013-2017 alone. SMByC data is the official source behind Colombia's reported deforestation figures, including the 36% year-on-year drop the Ministry of Environment announced in 2024 (123,517 ha in 2022 to 79,256 ha in 2023, a reduction of 44,262 ha).
SMByC measures and reports deforestation; it does not by itself cause reductions. Colombia's environment minister attributed the 2023 drop to factors beyond monitoring — limits on agribusiness expansion, a FARC-dissident deforestation ban and peace-process dynamics — and warned that 2024 figures showed deforestation rising again amid El Niño dry conditions, underscoring that satellite MRV is necessary but not sufficient for sustained forest protection.

Read the full analysis: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/8/colombia-deforestation-fell-to-historic-low-last-year