How Digital And Distributed Technology Are Being Used To Prevent Deforestation

Protecting existing forests around the world and ensuring more trees are planted has become one of the key battlefields in the fight against climate change.

Stopping deforestation is important on a number of levels. For one, trees act as carbon sinks, trapping in harmful pollutants and cleaning the air around us.

And they are also good for our mental health and the biodiversity of the planet, as a whole.

But in 2021 alone, we lost 25 million hectares of forests which released 10 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

As Nicole Rycroft, the founder of the environmental non-profit Canopy, said: “Keeping forests standing is the fastest, cheapest, and most effective way for us to stabilize our climate.”

There are many ways to achieve this, including a recently passed EU law, which will block products linked to deforestation from being sold on the EU market. 

Rycroft said the EU deforestation legislation sends a strong signal that “the window for business-as-usual logging is closed”, and supply chains need to transform accordingly.

Here in the U.K, the timber industry has also just published a net zero roadmap that aims to map and measure carbon emissions across the whole supply chain.

But technology is also playing an increasingly role in protecting trees from illegal logging and the growing threat of wildfires.

Satellite monitoring and sensors are now being deployed in many parts of the world, as the battle against deforestation goes digital.

One company at the forefront of this is the German early detection company Dryad, which aims to install 120 million solar-powered, early-warning sensors in forests around the world by 2030,

Dryad’s CEO Carsten Brinkschulte said its focus is on preventing man-made wildfires.

His company has just published a new report, which claims wildfires are responsible for up to 20% of global CO2 emissions and warns that figure could reach 30% by the end of the century.

He told Forbes a lot of people still believe that wildfires are carbon neutral, and that forests will naturally regrow and re-absorb the carbon lost during a blaze.

Brinkschulte said over the course of 100 or 200 years, that could theoretically happen, but issues around climate change need to be fixed now, or at least over the next two decades.

But Brinkschulte said people still underestimate the impact that wildfires have, particularly on human health through air pollution and heat.

And he added that 85% of wildfires are thought to be caused by human activity, some deliberate and some accidental.

“We want to eliminate human-induced wildfires, but we can only address this if solutions are deployed on a grand scale,” he said.

To this end, Dryad iswhich he said could save 3.5 million hectares from burning, as well as reduce carbon emissions significantly.

“All countries must work together to share data communicating the full impacts of wildfires to ensure the extent of the damage is fully understood,” he added.

The U.K. start-up iov42 and Singapore-based Double Helix Tracking Technologies are testing a new digital platform to tackle deforestation in the sourcing and supply chains of commodities, including timber.

The new platform uses distributed ledger technology to help organisations importing into the U.K. to comply with the due diligence requirements set by the 2021 Environment.

This legislation aims to establish clear statutory targets for the recovery of the natural world in four priority areas - air quality, biodiversity, water and waste.

Similar legislation to the U.K.’s will apply to organisations wanting to import into Europe under the EU deforestation law and the United States of America under the proposed US Forest Act.

Dominic von Trotha Taylor, CEO and chairman at iov42 said it will give organisations the tools they need to reach sustainability targets.

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