29-05-2023 — V1
Logbooks
Stories
Radio
Context pagesIntroduction1Context
Tree-planting is the process of transplanting tree seedlings, generally for forestry, land reclamation, or landscaping purposes. It differs from the transplantation of larger trees in arboriculture and from the lower-cost but slower and less reliable distribution of tree seeds. Trees contribute to their environment over long periods of time by providing oxygen, improving air quality, climate amelioration, conserving water, preserving soil, and supporting wildlife. During the process of photosynthesis, trees take in carbon dioxide and produce the oxygen we breathe.
Pratyush Mallick: DIY Devices for Forest Monitoring in IndiaLocation: Rourkela, Odisha, India
2Radio Episode
In this episode, we speak to Pratyush Mallick, developer of Forest Guardian, a DIY, open source device used to detect illegal logging in forest spaces. Pratyush discusses the potential of the DIY/hacking community for building technologies to address environmental change, and the politics of implementing these technologies on the ground in Indian forests.
Interviewers: Michelle Westerlaken and Trishant Simlai
Producer: Harry Murdoch
Alipay Ant ForestLocation: Hangzhou, China
3Logbook
Alipay is a Chinese online payment platform that developed Alipay Ant Forest, a gamified tree-planting initiative, in 2016. Alipay Ant Forest allows users to collect 'green energy points' from specific activities; once a user has grown a virtual tree from these points, Alipay will match it by planting a real tree via partner NGOs.
An infographic for Alipay Ant Forest. Image source: Ant Group. Retrieved 26 April 2023, from https://medium.com/alipay-and-the-world/alipay-gallery-ant-forest-tree-planting-spring-2019-dc4e0578cc7c
Alipay Ant Forest rewards users for various 'low carbon behaviours' including cycling, walking, making online payments, and using eco-cups. As of 2019, when Alipay Ant Forest won a UN Global Climate Action Award, the app had over 500 million registered users and had planted over 100 million trees in areas of Northwest China facing desertification. In addition to planting trees, partner NGOs have also committed to conserving particular areas with the funding from the app. Alipay Ant Forest is an example of the 'Internet + Ecology' strategy in China. The app draws on social media and game logics to allow users to share green energy points or compete with their friends. Alipay Ant Forest also includes satellite imagery and field monitor data that users can access.
Scholarship on Alipay Ant Forest has emphasised its positive impacts, focusing on how the platform promotes green behaviours and contributes to restoration and carbon sequestration efforts. However, there has been less engagement with questions around how sustainable the tree planting (and support needed for ongoing maintenance) will be in the longer term.
Brazil's Seed Networks4Logbook
Seed networks have been established in diverse regions of Brazil as grassroots initiatives for community participation in native plant material supply and landscape restoration activities. These community-led strategies involve linking communities that adopted several practices and technologies for seed collection, processing and storage with regional restoration projects.
The Xingu Seed Network is the largest native seed supplier in Brazil with a commercial production system (over 25 tonnes yearly) capable of contributing to meeting regional market demand in southeastern Amazonia. The community-based initiative was established in 2007 in a region with a high deforestation rate due to a history of intense and violent social conflicts between agricultural interests and Indigenous communities in the Amazon agrarian frontier.
Practitioners prepare the mix of seeds for land restoration through direct seeding. Source: Tui Anandi
Over more than one decade, the Xingu network has engaged more than 568 collectors and has created about US$ 1.4 million as household income. Local knowledge practices play a key role in promoting place-specific arrangements for collecting seeds of 220 native species, respecting sociocultural relations with the territories.
The Xingu network has helped stimulate demand for the native seeds that are offering new economic development opportunities for local communities, and the restoration experience in Xingu has been further shared and adopted elsewhere in Brazil, simulating the implementation of national restoration targets.
Check out more information on the Xingu Seed Network's webpage, or listen to our radio episode with Claudia Araújo.
The collaboration of multiple stakeholders resulted in the creation of the Cerrado de Pé Seed Collectors Association in 2012. This community-led seed supplier engages more than 60 households in 8 communities in Central Brazil. This network has advanced seed technologies and practices to supply diverse plant species for scaling-up restoration in the Cerrado region, including commonly neglected native grasses, forbs, and shrubs. The commercialization arrangements are supported by the Cerrado Seed Network which connects local seed collection groups with several regional restoration demands.
Learn more about the Cerrado de Pé and the Cerrado Seed Network.
The Arboretum is a forest restoration program that brings stakeholders together for seed collection, seedling production and restoration actions. The program is located in the middle of the Atlantic Forest Biome, between the South of the state of Bahia and the north of the state of Espírito Santo. This action was proposed by the Brazilian Forest Service in 2010 with the support of IBAMA using funding from fines applied to a forestry company.
The program has a Forest Conservation and Restoration Base, including a herbarium, seed laboratory, seed storage chambers, and seedling nursery.
The Redário platform is “the national network of the seed networks” in Brazil. This platform provides instruments to co-produce communication channels and facilitate practices to advance restoration activities. This national network assists knowledge sharing between different organizations and actors by using digital technologies, including collaborative platforms and apps for seed supply planning, management, and commercialization.
Forest Makers is a virtual reality documentary made by the Instituto Socioambiental (ISA) and the Xingu Seed Network Association (ARSX) to show the direct seeding method known as 'muvuca' (a mix or crowd of seeds) in action in the Xingu, Araguia, and Teles Pires watersheds. The VR aspects of the film highlight how the Xingu Seed Network seeks to situate Indigenous knowledges in longstanding and emerging reforestation knowledges, while also constructing modes of virtual participation and access for viewers who may be at a physical distance.
COP26Location: Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom
5Logbook
COP26 was the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Glasgow, United Kingdom, from 31 October to 13 November 2021.
Announcements at COP26 marked the biggest moment for forests and nature since the Paris Agreement. In Paris, only 45 countries mentioned forests and land sectors in their NDCs, and only 23 had quantitative, verifiable emissions reduction targets. During COP, several countries established targets for the forest and land sector in their NDCs, with a large increase in the number of quantitative emissions reduction targets, including:
Building on previous commitments under the New York Declaration on Forests, 141 countries committed to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030 through the endorsement of the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forest and Land Use. Together, they contain 91% of the world’s forests, an area of over 14 million square miles.
See the declaration here.
COP26 logo. Image source: COP26 website [image]. Retrieved 7 April 2022, from https://ukcop26.org/
How Digital Platforms Transform Global Forest Restoration ActionsLocation: Cambridge, United Kingdom
6Story
A growing number of digital technologies are increasingly aligned with an international target of restoring 350 million hectares of degraded lands by 2030. Our recently published research article in the journal Environmental Politics examines how digital platforms influence power dynamics in restoration activities. A wide range of digital devices and techniques promise a new paradigm for restoring hundreds of millions of hectares of degraded lands worldwide. Examples include digital systems for mapping degraded landscapes, robotics for tree planting, and mobile applications for plant species identification and selection for restoration. At the same time, our recent assessment discloses how digital platforms influence restoration decision-making processes that can create or exacerbate unequal power dynamics in knowledge production, financing, and market arrangements.
As part of a global search, we identified and tested 55 digital platforms applied to restoration activities to understand their operations. These platforms include multi-user databases, geospatial mapping and planning, smartphone applications, games, blockchain systems, crowd-funding networks, and social media. You can find the complete list of the selected digital platforms here. By analyzing these platforms, we identified four social-political drivers of technological developments. You can learn more about each of them below.
A mobile application for plant species identification. Photo: Jennifer Gabrys
This first digital development driver highlights scientific knowledge's role in maximizing tasks to implement ambitious international restoration goals and policies. Scientific expertise for restoration produces and organizes technologies to predict scenarios, select feasible methods, and create supposedly cost-effective interventions. For instance, international environmental NGOs launched the Atlas of Forest and Landscape Restoration Opportunities in 2011 to identify priority degraded lands to be restored globally. Another example is the Framework for Ecosystem Restoration Monitoring, a geospatial platform that measures the progress of restoration actions. Even though these digital platforms may help accomplish international pledges, these developments often fail to incorporate local knowledge and place-based issues to plan where and how restoration should be undertaken.
Screenshot of the Atlas of Forest Landscape Restoration Opportunities interactive map. Image source: The World Resources Institute Atlas of Forest Landscape Restoration Opportunities website. Retrieved 23 June 2022, from https://www.wri.org/applications/maps/flr-atlas/
In the form of collaborative channels, these capacity-building networks interconnect diverse stakeholders for data collection, resource exchange, and communication. These digital networks seek to decentralize information, promote collaboration, and support access to financial resources for restoration projects. For instance, the Restor platform is a digital network that connects practitioners and organizations running restoration actions worldwide. The Land Accelerator program is another example of an international channel to connect multiple stakeholders in order to mobilize resources for projects at the local level. These platforms offer tools for managing systems and resources to support decision-making processes, which further generate specific models and arrangements for restoration actions. At the same time, there are several ethical and sovereignty issues on how these systems enforce particular practices and use data, particularly when these datasets are applied to develop carbon markets, for example.
Screenshot of the Restor platform. Image source: Restor website. Retrieved 23 June 2022, from https://restor.eco/
Our study also identified emerging restoration markets that are materializing through digital supply chains that link stakeholders with tree-planting commercial arrangements. Through digitally enabled networks, the British online platform, TreeApp, supports planting hundreds of thousands of trees yearly. This mobile application encourages users to engage with advertisements from several brands to generate credits for tree planting across 14 projects in the Global South. These digital restoration platforms create easy-to-use infrastructures for individuals and companies to offset carbon emissions. Still, they commonly present a potential disconnect with actual restoration practices on the ground, which could work to develop meaningful livelihood improvements and transparent restoration actions.
Screenshot of the Treeapp's website. Image source: Treeapp. Retrieved 23 June 2022, from https://www.thetreeapp.org/
Digital platforms are also a critical component of diverse grassroots restoration initiatives and practices of community stakeholders in everyday experiences. Community-led restoration actions adopt digital platforms to improve communication processes between local stakeholders to activate and mobilize regional restoration networks. These restoration groups and community networks are, for example, present on social media to share practices, lessons, and struggles that help share experiences and improve restoration actions. In Brazil, a partnership between community-based seed suppliers led to the formulation of Redário, a national platform to assist regional restoration networks. Redário has co-produced a seed supply management platform to coordinate commercial operations of seed suppliers with restoration markets. Notably, the co-creation process is not a simple participatory activity and may not always include the diversity of local values, interests, and financial goals.
These four different drivers of technological developments highlight how digital platforms can shape restoration projects. This study suggests the need for critical attention to these emerging environmental technologies to comprehend how knowledge and expertise are coded into the politics of platforms. Such platform-led restoration actions can contribute to and amplify inequality issues when implementing restoration initiatives across scales.
For more information, you can access the full open-access article at:
Urzedo, Danilo, Westerlaken, Michelle, and Gabrys, Jennifer. "Digitalizing Forest Landscape Restoration: A Social and Political Analysis of Emerging Technological Practices." Environmental Politics. DOI: 10.1080/09644016.2022.2091417.
Contributors7
Kate Lewis Hood was a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the Smart Forests project. Kate completed an interdisciplinary environmental humanities PhD from Queen Mary University of London, which considered how Black and Indigenous poetic and spatial practices address watery places transformed by colonialism and racial capitalism in Turtle Island/North America and the Pacific islands. Kate is interested in how colonial logics, practices, and geographies endure in watery and forest environments, and how creative methods contribute to their contestation and reimagining.
Credits8Context
For more information on the Smart Forests project, contact Prof Jennifer Gabrys.
Follow us on Twitter for the latest updates on the Smart Forests project and the Planetary Praxis research group.
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement No. 866006).
The Smart Forests Atlas is free to use for non-commercial purposes (with attribution) under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. For more information, please read our licence.
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Fonts: Monaco, Marr
Design process: web to print, API, pagedjs
Graphic design: Angeline Ostinelli and Sarah Garcin
Tree-planting is the process of transplanting tree seedlings, generally for forestry, land reclamation, or landscaping purposes. It differs from the transplantation of larger trees in arboriculture and from the lower-cost but slower and less reliable distribution of tree seeds. Trees contribute to their environment over long periods of time by providing oxygen, improving air quality, climate amelioration, conserving water, preserving soil, and supporting wildlife. During the process of photosynthesis, trees take in carbon dioxide and produce the oxygen we breathe.