Author: LisaP

Conservation leaders join successfully with technologists to thwart artisanal gold mining and illegal logging by creating early warning systems and transparency. 

BY LISA PALMER ON 15 AUGUST 2019 

Originally published in Mongabay: Artisanal Mining

• Peru’s Los Amigos Biological Station stands on a dividing line between the devastation caused by a gold rush centered on La Pampa, and a vast swath of conserved lands that includes Manú National Park — likely the most biologically important protected area in Latin America — plus its conserved buffers.
• Teaming up to defend these thriving forests and their biodiversity are conservationists and technologists — an innovative alliance that includes Conservación Amazónica (ACCA), Amazon Conservation (ACA), the Andes Amazon Fund, along with other organizations.
• Among the precision conservation tools they use to patrol against invading artisanal miners and illegal loggers are drones, acoustic monitoring, machine learning, lidar and thermal imaging — all applied to protecting one of the most biologically diverse regions on Earth.
• Conservationists are hopeful not only that they’ll be able to protect Manú National Park and its buffers, but that they may be able to one day help remediate and restore the wrecked habitat of La Pampa. This integrative approach, they say, is vital to conserving the region’s biodiversity against the escalating climate crisis.

LOS AMIGOS BIOLOGICAL STATION, Peru — The mother capybara and her three babies chew on grasses along the Los Amigos River as we drift near. Around a bend, white caimans fortify each sandbar, mouths open, waiting. Kingfishers plunge into the water to retrieve a morning meal, as oropendolas fly overhead. Spider monkeys and red howlers balance in the treetops of the soaring canopy 30 to 60 meters (100 to 200 feet) high that lines both riverbanks.

Much of this Amazon landscape in southern Peru could soon go missing — lost to the roaring suction pumps, scouring vacuum hoses and mercury poisoning that comes with artisanal gold mining, or the chainsaws that accompany illegal logging — but for the two men we ride with in our boat. They and others like them are implementing elements of precision conservation, a Silicon Valley approach and high-tech synthesis using drones, acoustic monitoring, machine learning, lidar and thermal imaging, applied to protecting the most biologically diverse region on Earth.

Percy Avalos sits at the bow of the canoe, pointing to floating logs and other hazards, as Davis Vargas steers the peque-peque, a tiny motor adapted to negotiate the shallows of this meandering, lowland river that borders one side of the nearly 500-kilometer (300-mile) perimeter of a vast conservation concession.

I departed in the fog at dawn to join Vargas and Avalos on their weekly river patrol, leaving from the shore of the tropical Los Amigos Biological Station and Concession that buffers the eastern side of Manú National Park, considered by many to be the single most biologically important protected area in Latin America. [Continue reading at MONGABAY]

LISA PALMER is an independent journalist and senior fellow at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center who has documented the science, environment, and social challenges of a changing global environment for over 15 years. Palmer is the author of HOT, HUNGRY PLANET: The Fight to Stop a Food Crisis in the Face of Climate Change. Over the past two decades, Palmer’s reporting has taken her to remote landscapes, most recently to Colombia’s Amazon to document the agricultural expansion post-conflict and the efforts to promote more sustainable livelihoods. Based in Maryland, she tells stories at the intersection of science and society and how those stories may (or may not) lead to a sustainable future. She has written for The New Republic, Nature journals, Scientific American, The Guardian, The New York Times, Yale E60, and many others.

Standard efforts have failed to slow the pace of extinctions, so Conservation X Labs is trying a fresh approach. Read my latest story in Nature.

By Lisa Palmer

Beads of sweat form on Alex Dehgan’s brow as he steps through the mist and heat of the tropical conservatory at the US Botanic Garden in Washington DC. The air is not as hot and humid as in the forests of Madagascar, but the warmth reminds him of the two and a half years he spent there, studying lemur populations and surviving bouts of cerebral malaria, schistosomiasis and dysentery

Dehgan enters the medicinal plant garden and finds the Madagascar periwinkle (Catharanthus roseus), a plant that led to key treatments for childhood leukaemia and is now endangered in its natural habitat. Famous for its biodiversity, Madagascar lost nearly 40% of its forests between the 1950s and 2000 — and probably many unknown plant and animal species, says Dehgan, who trained as an evolutionary biologist. “How many more things could we have found?” he wonders.

That’s the kind of issue that has driven Dehgan over the past two decades. After an unorthodox career in science that has included setting up a national park in an active war zone in Afghanistan, Dehgan is betting his retirement on hacking the field of conservation. He wants to harness the power of technological innovation to transform the practice of preserving ecosystems and species.

 

Here is my latest commentary for Scientific American. I write that creating sustainable food systems in the face of a changing climate isn’t easy—but innovators around the world are making real progress.

I argue that “[w]e need to move beyond thinking about the environment—our land, water and air—only as a source of inputs for the food system,” I write. “Instead we need to recognize that global environmental changes can diminish yields, reduce the amount of food we produce, and affect how nutritious it is and where we produce it.”

But change is not easy. How can leverage points in food systems and in institutions help us work toward solutions? I cover some solutions in my new book, Hot, Hungry Planet.

In my commentary, I write:

Weather extremes and environmental shocks, for instance, will likely occur more frequently in the future. In California, the multi-year drought and recent lifting of the drought emergency after a heavy rain and snow year has had a cascade of lingering effects, calling for greater management of both extremes and making water conservation “a way of life” by executive order. The four objectives of California’s new management plan include educational and policy nudges such as using water more wisely, eliminating water waste, strengthening local drought resilience and water holding capacity, and improving agricultural water use efficiency and drought planning.

Any successful answer to feeding a hot, hungry planet will result from continual changes, shifts, and adaptation to an uncertain future. Figuring out where society can sustainably grow more food and how people might try to do that under climate change will be inextricably linked to national security, public health, and economic goals. Food system challenges in a changing climate have already led to political instability in some places, and migrations and tensions over changing amount and location of natural resources are likely to grow.

Creating sustainable food systems that deliver nutritious food while also satisfying long term food security is a complex undertaking, as I learned over the past few years while writing and researching my new book Hot, Hungry Planet: The Fight to Stop a Global Food Crisis in the Face of Climate Change. I met with the people who are working at the issue from every angle. The farmers, agronomists, and researchers I talked with are trying to fulfill economic, social and environmental objectives while not compromising prospects for future generations.

To continue reading, please go to my piece in the Observatory blog in Scientific American.