A pilot program reveals that deforestation declined when Peruvian Indigenous communities use an...
Now a new effort that combines in-person monitoring by members of Indigenous communities with satellite data and smartphone technology holds promise to help put the brakes on deforestation in the Amazon-and potentially other forests elsewhere in the world-a study suggests.
As part of a pilot program to test the idea, the scientists collaborated with a total of 76 Indigenous communities in Peru, 36 of which participated in using the alerts to monitor the forest.
As monitors, they patrolled the rain forest to investigate alerts, watched for deforestation in other areas and then reported back to their respective communities.
They found the early alert program reduced forest loss by 8.4 hectares in the first year, a 52 percent reduction, compared with the average deforestation in the control communities, says study co-author Tara Slough.
"The implication of this finding is that if one were to continue the program, targeting it to the communities facing the biggest threats should avert the most tree cover loss," says Slough, a political economist at New York University.
"Given that it is implementable at the community level, this represents an important and scalable tool to empower communities to reduce deforestation." The results were published in July in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. The monitoring program was less effective in its second year, when forest loss was reduced by only 3.3 hectares compared to control communities.
"Would this work in all communities that have high risk of deforestation? Given the results, it's worth a try." She points out that the communities in the region are diverse-different factors influence their risk of forest loss and capacity to monitor it.
Some communities may not have access to the resources or training needed for a deforestation monitoring program, or their territories may hold valuable minerals or petroleum that would increase the risk of deforestation by outsiders despite monitoring efforts, Tucker notes.
Indigenous communities may also continue the work they started in the pilot program.
"We want to replicate this [effort] in other communities. In doing so, we are making a contribution to the world," wrote Francisco Hernandez Cayetano, a community member involved in the research and president of the Federation of the Ticuna and Yaguas Communities of the Lower Amazon, in a translated statement to Scientific American.