Zitec joins forces with the Ministry of Environment to stop illegal deforestation in Romania’s forests

Zitec announces a new partnership with the Ministry of Environment, Water and Forests (MMAP). This collaboration represents an important step in the efforts of both entities to accelerate the digitalization of the public sector and promote innovative solutions to protect the environment.

The partnership between Zitec and MMAP is an extension of the pilot project initiated last fall, which aimed at the advanced analysis of data from the SUMAL 2.0 application related to November 2023. Within this pilot program, 400,684 transport notices were successfully processed, respectively 1 .6 million photos in a span of just three days, using Google solutions. Without the intervention of technology, processing the same amount of data would have required the effort of a team of 125 people and ten times the amount of time.

Following the pilot, fines amounting to 3.84 million lei were imposed and 1038 cubic meters of wood were confiscated, worth 281,000 lei, placing the project among the few initiatives that are not only self-financing, but also generate a considerable surplus for the budget state. Thus, it is reconfirmed that digitization and new technologies are essential for increasing efficiency and achieving national objectives.

For the next five months, the software solution provided by Zitec and based on Google technologies will analyze all transport notices related to the year 2024. Considering the results of the pilot project, the amounts generated from fines in 2024 are expected to be even higher.

“Despite the fact that Romania is not among the pioneers of digitization, it is gratifying that the public sector is starting to invest strategically in this area, bravely using cutting-edge technologies.

Artificial intelligence offers the potential to accelerate digital transformation on a large scale, and the benefits for the entire population are a strong motivation for us, especially since in this case we are talking about curbing the destruction of forests. Our decade-long partnership with Google gives us access to a cutting-edge technology ecosystem critical to the project’s success.

The current legislative framework and the way in which the SUMAL platform was designed, meant that the appointed team from the Ministry did not have the physical possibility to effectively analyze all the opinions in the platform. This limitation was aggravated by the fact that the statute of limitations kicks in very quickly, in just 6 calendar months, for notices completed without compliance with the law. Our technology

it now allows us to identify violations of the law in a much shorter time, and in the future we could notify the competent authorities in real time. We are optimistic about the future of digitization in Romania and honored that we can contribute, through technology, to a fairer and greener Romania”, says Alexandru Lăpușan, CEO & Founding Partner Zitec.

The technical solution proposed by Zitec, in partnership with Google, is based on a robust architecture that integrates VertexAI and Gemini PRO, along with other tools from the Google infrastructure such as BigQuery, Cloud Functions and Pub/Sub. This suite of technologies enables sophisticated visual analysis, going beyond simple object identification. By means of 49 parameters and advanced correlation algorithms, the solution developed by Zitec is able to detect not only the elements present in an image, but also to extract complex information about the relationships and meanings hidden in them.

The project benefits from a total budget of almost 300,000 lei including VAT and is scheduled to be completed at the end of the current year.