Imazon

Imazon (Instituto do Homem e Meio Ambiente da Amazônia) is a Brazilian non-profit research institute dedicated to promoting conservation and sustainable development in the Amazon. Founded in Belém, Pará, it is one of the most respected independent scientific institutions focused on the region.

Partnering with NotABC we built and shipped a completely new webpage and CMS for Imazon, replacing a previous Wordpress portal with massive technical debt and scaling issues.

My role

I oversaw the project in its entirety: interviewing the client, arriving together at viable designs, scoping out the solution, negotiating costs and deadlines, interviewing, capacitating and leading the engineering team behind the project, architecting the new platform, configuring its infrastructure, deploying CI/CD pipelines, ingesting pre-existing platform data, building the core business logic, user interface, data integration, security layer and domain configuration and finally educating the client on using the new platform.

What they do

Imazon’s work spans five core research programs:

• Amazon Monitoring — tracking deforestation, degradation, and land use change using satellite imagery and remote sensing
• Landscape Restoration — developing strategies and tools for forest restoration at scale
• Protected Areas — evaluating and strengthening indigenous lands, conservation units, and quilombola territories
• Policy and Socioeconomics — producing evidence to inform public policy on land, environment, and the bioeconomy
• Law and Sustainability — bridging environmental law, governance, and on-the-ground conservation

Their flagship monitoring system, SAD (Sistema de Alerta de Desmatamento), produces monthly deforestation alerts for the Brazilian Amazon, used by journalists, policymakers, and NGOs across the world. Imazon also maintains IPS Brasil, a platform measuring social and environmental progress across Brazilian municipalities using composite indicators for health, education, and quality of life.