Fighting Deforestation and Biodiversity Loss

Listen: Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | Pandora | Podbean | Boomplay

One of the biggest sustainability challenges we are facing today is biodiversity loss. By 2018 worldwide wildlife populations had declined by 69% from where they were in 1970. Almost 70 percent of wildlife gone in less than 50 years time! The international union for Conservation of Nature has a Red List of threatened species, and out of the more than 166,000 species they monitor, over 46,300 are threatened. More than 1 in 4!  One of the habitats that holds the most biodiversity is tropical forests, and that means that when deforestation happens there it has a much greater negative impact on our planet’s biodiversity than almost anywhere else.  Tropical forests are being cut down, burned, and cleared alarmingly fast, with currently about 10 football or soccer fields worth disappearing every single minute. In each of those areas we may be losing entire species of plants, animals, and fung i forever, some we hadn’t even discovered yet. These areas of forest are cleared for logging, cattle grazing, oil palm plantations, or other reasons. Sometimes the clearing is done in secret and isn’t discovered until someone analyzes satellite imagery of the area. These forests not only are biological diversity hotspots, but also help control water cycles, absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen, store vast amounts of that carbon, purify water, and provide homes and livelihoods for many millions of people. By cutting and burning them down we are releasing millions of tons of carbon dioxide which warms the planet, releasing air pollution, and we are disrupting water cycles (as can be seen across the Amazon right now), and basically sabotaging our world and our future.

Forests provide a huge amount of benefit, but that benefit isn’t taken into account by our economic systems, and so they are seen as not generating wealth despite all they do for us. Only by cutting them down and selling the wood, or by clearing the land to use for something else such as cattle or palm oil can money be made from them. This is a horribly shortsighted view and really needs to be remedied quickly, before the tropical forests are all gone. There are some attempts to calculate the benefit that forests provide to society, economies, and our civilizations as a whole and have some kind of payments for those services, but it is a slow governmental process that is being actively opposed by those who value short-term profits above all else.

How can we change this? Changing the whole political landscape around the world to enable this isn’t really possible, and even if it were it would take so long that there likely wouldn’t be any forests left to save. Is there some other way to provide a financial benefit now to landowners around the world for simply leaving their forests intact, and which doesn’t rely on fickle governmental policies and temporary interventions from administrations that come and go?

I started thinking and thinking about that. Could there possibly be some way that the owners of forest land could get paid to simply leave it be and keep it intact as forest? Often the area near the forest is sparsly populated (which is why it is still forest) and so the small local populations, if any, couldn’t really be expected to provide the money to support them. Could there be a way for people all around the world to actively support the preservation of forests, no matter where they are? And giving money to preserve forests around the world is certainly worthwhile, but how can people be, and stay, actively engaged? How could they be sure that their money was actually being used to keep forests intact? 

So I thought and thought and thought, and what I eventually came up with is sort of a weird mix of social media and trail cameras. Here’s how it works:

A landowner agrees to preserve/maintain/keep a certain section of their land as forest. They sign an agreement that they will not allow logging, clearing, or other significant human action of that particular piece of land. Each piece will be of a set size, let’s say a square kilometer. For every square kilometer that they agree to preserve, a solar powered trail camera will be installed somewhere in that square kilometer. This camera would be motion-controlled to snap pictures whenever an animal comes by, but also on something like a timer so it doesn’t take more pictures than it can hold or upload. The cameras would have a satellite internet connection to upload the pictures that they take. Now, these cameras can’t be too high up if they are going to be able to capture pictures of animals on the ground, but the solar panels also need to be high enough in the forest canopy to catch enough light to power them. Probably they would need to consist of a solar panel which is mounted high up in a tree, connected by a long durable cable to the camera part mounted far below. Since it is higher up the solar panel could also house the satellite internet connection. For every one of these cameras the landowner (whether an individual, company, or even government) would receive a certain amount of money every month. So, now you’re obviously wondering where this money for both the cameras, the network, and the payments to the landowners would come from.

People all over the world love watching nature documentaries and learning about nature. I love watching them myself, however, these are made over a long time, taking years to produce and release. You don’t exactly know when the footage was shot, nor what is going on in those places now, and that puts a bit of a distance, wall, or disconnection between the viewer and the natural world they are viewing. Nature documentaries are wonderful, educating and enlightening us about the wonders of our world, but in some sense those are still just far-off places on the other side of the world that we have little real connection to. However, in the idea above there are all of these pictures being uploaded every single day from cameras in forests all over the world. This is where the social media aspect of this idea comes in, have a social media app and site where subscribers can view these pictures that are uploaded daily. Users can look through the pictures and find photos of birds, primates, large insects, big cats, and more. Imagine being able look through these and see new wildlife pictures that no one else has ever seen before. Users can tag pictures with information identifying the animals, and they can share really interesting or unique pictures with other users. I don’t know about you, but I would love looking through pictures that were just taken of wildlife from forests around the world. That would really give me a sense of connectedness with forests around the world, and a sense of immediacy of what is happening in those forests right now. Imagine being the first one to find a picture of an animal that no one has ever seen before.

Of course the subscribers to this site or app would pay a subscription fee. Let’s say each subscriber pays $10 a month. Then let’s say that $4 would go to support the app, hardware, servers, development and support teams, and infrastructure, and the rest would go towards making the payments to the landowners. In fact, the subscription fee would just be a minimum, and the subscriber could voluntarily pay more per month to help further and expand the preservation efforts. The more money that comes in the more cameras can be placed in more square kilometers of forest that will be preserved.

Another aspect of this is that there really can be pictures of animals that no one has ever seen before, as well as providing data on animal populations and ranges. Given that, this system would be a big benefit to biologists and university biology departments around the world. These university departments could have special subscriptions that would give them access to more information than your average subscriber, such as specific location data. That information wouldn’t be available to regular subscribers so that it doesn’t unwittingly aid poachers who might subscribe. The university accounts could also tag the pictures with greater and deeper information such as species, diet, ranges, and other interesting information. All users can see this information, see that it was added by a university account, and which university it was added by. With cameras in forests all over the world uploading pictures of different species, this system could greatly aid biologists in identifying new species, migration patterns, population estimates, distribution ranges, and more.  Of course these accounts would need to have much higher fees, and have a stringent application process to prove they are actually working for that university. Perhaps the university accounts would also have special access to allow the integration of their own AI tools to search through the vast amounts of pictures to identify ones with particular types of animals and tag them for closer examination and classification.

The only other organizations that could get the location info might be governmental anti-poaching squads, if the system happens to capture pictures of poachers, and the organization passes a strict vetting process as well. Perhaps an AI integration might be needed to identify any pictures with humans in them and not display them to regular users but only to university and anti-poaching accounts.

These subscriptions, from individuals and universities all of the world, would provide the funds to support the landowners in preserving and maintaining their areas of forest land. How much could be paid? If the network were to reach up to 10 million regular users at $10 apiece, and 1,000 universities at let’s say $1,000 a month, that would be an income of $101 million. Let’s say there are 100,000 cameras in 100,000 square kilometers of forest around the world. If we estimate the cost of the servers, infrastructure, cameras, salaries, and everything at 41 million, that would leave 60 million to distribute to the the landowners. That would be $600 per camera per month, or $7,200 per year, per square kilometer, for simply leaving their forest land natural and wild as it is. It isn’t a huge amount, but it is something, an ongoing income for these landowners, whether they are private individuals, companies, or even governmental national park/preserve departments. The largest national park in Peru is Alto Purus with over 25,000 square kilometers. If they were able to get agreements and cameras on only 5,000 of their 25,000 kilometers, that would be $3 million per year that they would receive.

No doubt there would need to be some active monitoring of the land to ensure that the landowners are sticking to their agreements. Any landowner or governmental entity could make pledges or agreements for many square kilometers of their land, all of which they would have to keep natural and pristine. To monitor areas all over the world on a regular basis would almost certainly have to be done through the analysis of satellite imagery. There would need to be penalties or warnings for any land that is damaged while under this agreement. Multiple violations would likely have to be dealt with more harshly, possibly by cancellation of the agreement for that piece of land, or maybe even eventually for every square kilometer and camera that they have.

There are many many things about the idea and the system that would have to be figured out, but I think it is at least a very interesting idea. Even if all the details were figured out, one big difficulty is that the agreements, placement of cameras, servers, computer systems, and entire network would have to be set up and functioning before large amounts of people would start to subscribe to the network. That would take a significant upfront investment, and so is probably the biggest barrier to this happening.

If somehow it did happen, I think this system could be make significant impact in slowing down the deforestation that is ravaging forests around the world, and tropical forests in particular. It would also give people all around the world a much more immediate and intimate connection to these forests and the animals that inhabit them. The subscriptions would provide some monetary income for having and preserving natural forests, until someday when our governments and economic systems finally come to recognize the incredibly useful services and vast amount of value that these forests provide to not only the locals, but the whole region they are in, and to the planet as a whole. We must preserve these forests around the world, and this is one potential way to help do just that.

By Eric Sparks, 2025