Deforestation | How can we catch illegal loggers in real-time? How do we protect our forests when 90% of logging is done illegally?
With enhanced, previously owned cell phones Rainforest Connection (RFCx) is monitoring the rainforests to detect illegal acts in remote areas.
THE PROBLEM
Our rainforests. The lungs of our planet. Each year we are losing 31,000 square miles of tropical forests per year, which is tantamount to the size of South Carolina or the Czech Republic. Would you be content watching your grandfather smoke 3 packs a day, knowing what we know today about lung cancer? Can we continue to sit by and watch the same thing happening to our planet, actions leading to a slow, painful and almost certain death? Much like the lungs are to the human body, the forests are a vital part of the global ecology; food, habitats, water cycles and carbon storage are all reliant on the trees of our forests.
In a recent article, the BBC reviews some of the devastating impact possibilities were our trees to disappear. The list includes: a drastically altered climate; massive extinctions of biodiversity; drought, flooding and colossal erosion; extreme temperature increases; agricultural system devastation; disease outbreaks; and mental health imbalances. Just to name a few. As Thomas Crowther, a global systems ecologist at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and lead author of the 2015 Nature study, says, “This planet is unique from everything else we currently know in the universe because of this unexplainable thing called life, and without trees, almost all of it would just be screwed.”
The big question is, how, with 90% of the logging in tropical rainforest currently being done illegally, can we “unscrew” ourselves? How, after already losing 20% of the Amazon rainforest in the last four decades, can we save our planet from these calamitous possibilities?
A SOLUTION
Well, ladies and gentlemen, we would like to direct your attention to the Rainforest Connection, or RFCx. A company which has brilliantly combined what already exists: people, connectivity and trash (old cell phones) to combat deforestation.
After being inspired by rainforest conservation in 2012, at a gibbon protection program in Borneo, Topher White founded the Rainforest Connection in 2014. Since then, the world has been talking and they have received some very high press honors. Joining the fight against deforestation, which is the second highest contributor to climate change, is no small feat and RFCx is taking it on like champions.
When Topher realized that hundreds of millions of phones are thrown away each year in the US alone, he didn’t see trash, he saw opportunity. Also recognizing that if you enhance the phone’s microphone, power it with specifically designed solar panels and place it in a tree, it can become the perfect acoustic real-time monitoring system. The jungle can be a loud place, and chainsaws are almost completely undetectable by the human ear, but these monitoring systems can hear a chainsaw as far away as 1 kilometer, and up to approximately 3 square kilometers.
Tracking illegal loggers can be quite challenging because the uninterrupted noise of the forest easily camouflages the sound of a chainsaw or trucks. RFCx’s device can hear through the jungle sounds to detect the specific sounds that are associated with illegal logging. At that moment of detection, the device sends a real-time alert to authorities. It is these real-time notifications that help their on-the-ground partners stop the culprits while in process of the illegal act, which has proven to be the best way to keep the culprits from returning to the location. Since the introduction of machine learning, RFCx’s capabilities have grown vastly. Today the systems can not only recognize the sounds of chainsaws, but logging trucks, vehicles, gunshots and certain species of animals.
By banding together and thinking simply, beyond high-tech innovation, like Rainforest Connection, we can work to stop the injustices being done to our planet in real-time. But, in the meantime, during a quick break from saving the planet, if you want to listen to the soothing sounds of the rainforest, RFCx now has an app to help you connect with the beauty of nature!
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