Years of resilience.
In 2012, Ajay Goyal founded Zening, Europe's first five-star yoga and meditation resort, in Cyprus. In December 2012, a flash flood struck the resort. While repairing and restoring the property, and concerned about other risks lurking in the surrounding hills, mountains and forestland of north-west Cyprus, he commissioned aerial surveys of the area.
The surveys revealed several natural-disaster risks, but the most immediate and dangerous was wildfire. The resort village was surrounded by years of dead vegetation and debris: fuel for an inferno, waiting only for a spark. Taking no chances, he cleared more than a decade of accumulated fuel, cut firebreaks and ploughed the surrounding fields.
In the summer of 2015, with more than 400 guests at the resort, a massive wildfire broke out in the nearby hills and fields. Helicopters, aircraft, firefighters on the ground and local villagers fought the blaze. The fire never reached the resort, thanks to the preventive action taken on the evidence of aerial observation.
As wildfires continued to strike Cyprus, Greece and the wider Mediterranean, causing billions in damage and driving rare plants and animals towards extinction, Goyal turned to the science of Satellite Earth Observation. He researched how fuel build-up and fire risk could be predicted, and how preventive action could stop fires before they start. In 2021, he founded ForestSATai, joined by a team of Earth Observation and forest-science professionals.
Since then, the ForestSATai team has dedicated nearly five years of passionate, persistent work to one goal: building a platform that can see wildfire risk coming and help the world act on it in time.
We have stayed the course because we believe two things deeply. Saving the planet's forests, wildlife and communities from wildfire is possible. And doing everything we can to achieve it is a moral imperative.
