The Role Mobile Technology Can Play in Community-Based Environmental Monitoring Programs
Community-based monitoring programs for environmental protection are a significant, although largely untapped, source of potentially significant monitoring data for forest and wildlife protection and ecosystem health. They can also offer substantial benefits for the livelihoods of local communities.
The UNFCCC’s REDD+ mechanism (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) is intended to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate climate change that affords a role for collaborative efforts with local communities in the monitoring of changes.
It makes sense to engage local communities in monitoring efforts. Those living in communities near forestry resources are closest on the ground to witness and record illegal logging, unauthorized forest clearing for agricultural use, and damage to waterways.
Some studies find that “locally driven and small scale forest change activities (deforestation, forest degradation or reforestation)” are more effectively measured by local community forest management programs than by big data resources such as satellite imagery.
Local communities are also important stakeholders in protecting environmental resources, with many relying on sustainable forests for their livelihoods. Engaging those local communities in monitoring efforts can help contribute to their livelihoods directly, by providing compensation for their monitoring work, and indirectly by helping sustain environmental resources on which they rely.
But there are challenges. Local communities often have an unclear role in national or subnational monitoring systems. There has also been a lack of tools for them to observe and record/report changes.
The use of mobile technologies has been identified as one key tool that can spur the enhancement of monitoring at the local level. Cheaper modern mobile phones, equipped with internet connectivity, cameras, GPS receivers, and data storage can arm local communities with the tools to record, verify, and communicate changes to forest resources.
As Skutsch and Ba (2010) found:
“Simple datasets collected with handheld devices such as tree density, DBH, forest changes and human activities affecting forest carbon are the variables that can be efficiently monitored by communities.”
The key is to standardize the collection of data and enmesh it into the national monitoring framework so that the granular data collected at the local level can be incorporated into bigger-picture national-level data.
Havuta’s beneficiary/stakeholder feedback app can be deployed by organizations seeking the input of disparately situation communities to get real-time, up-to-date data on changes to environmental resources like forests.
Supported by a rigorous verification infrastructure built on blockchain technology, and powered by inbuilt incentives to encourage participation, it could be a critical tool in the toolbox for fighting one of humanity’s most pressing existential crises — climate change.
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