Modern Technology for sustainable Forest Management in India

Emerging Digital Technologies for Monitoring can Transform Indian Forest Management

The importance of forests is rapidly growing not only for ‘traditional’ resources like food, timber, and non-timber forest products, but also for a range of other ecosystem services like water purification, climate regulation, carbon removals and carbon storage, necessary to ensure a harmonic balance for the existence of life. This growing importance makes sustainable management of forests even more critical for dependent populations, economic growth, and climate action.

In this regard, data from forests is becoming vital. Forest managers need to track more and more parameters to assess the health of forests. Having access to data helps forest managers monitor threats, prioritise interventions based on the location’s needs, and identify areas at risk so that advanced measures to address these challenges can be taken. Forests offer nature-based solutions to address climate change; reliable and transparent data is becoming mandatory to access national and international climate finance via mechanisms of carbon markets and REDD+. Central and South American countries like Costa Rica, Argentina and Colombia have already received funding from the Green Climate Fund’s REDD+ Results-Based Payments pilot for their demonstration of emissions reduction through effective monitoring processes. Monitoring and reporting are key for assessing interventions made and supporting sustainable adaptive management. Today, large volumes of reliable and transparent data translate to better forest management. Several pilots across the world, in countries like the United States, China, Sweden and Finland, validate this.

The challenge? Data collection from forests is demanding

Forest data collection is complicated due to the dynamic nature of forest ecosystems. There are different species of trees, as well as trees of different ages. Forest growth is highly dependent on microclimatic and geophysical conditions, which change over the course of a year. Forests cover large areas, making manual data collection cumbersome. Even though remote sensing and satellite imagery have made data collection easier, they come with their own challenges. Satellite data is heavy (terabytes of data across different spectrums), coarse (often >15 m resolution), and periodic (data can only be collected when the satellite is above the forest patch in question).

Emerging technologies like Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI), single-window digital platforms, and Internet of Things (IoT) hold much promise in addressing these challenges by reducing redundancy, increasing scale (finer data at more frequent intervals), and improving accuracy in the data collected from forests. For example, real-time data on forest soil health can be collected through ground-installed devices connected via IoT. ML and AI techniques can be employed to analyse the collected data and detect areas with deteriorating soil health, prompting targeted remedial action. Forest managers get insights at a granularity previously unimaginable.

Emerging technologies in forest management

For example, the US-based start-up NCX is using ML to sift through field data collected by the US Forest Service and train their software to identify the size and species composition of 0.2-hectare grids of US forests from satellite imagery. ML algorithms are adept at activities like identification of anomalies in images, identifying tree species, counting trees, etc., thus reducing human input.

A combination of ML and AI can be powerful. While ML helps sift through large troves of data, AI can help inform decision making by computing and delivering insights remarkably quickly. The start-up 20tree.ai is applying ML/AI on high-quality satellite data to assess forest health and provide managers with detailed feedback. A task that would otherwise take months, is being completed within minutes.

Realtime data at scales of <10 meters can transform how we monitor threats like fires and illegal logging, where each second is crucial. Pilots around implementing emerging technologies for such purposes are already underway, for example by Dryad Networks for real-time forest fire monitoring and the Hitachi – Institute of Wood Science & Technology, Bengaluru collaboration to prevent illegal logging.

There is a great deal of activity in the agroforestry space in India, as it is seen as an important aspect of achieving food security, boosting economic growth, and meeting India’s climate goals.

This sector can greatly benefit from technologies like IoT and single-window platforms. While the interconnected devices in the IoT collect data on several parameters of the agroforestry patch, dedicated single-window platforms can map, tag, and register agroforestry resources and monitor progress from the planting stage to the felling stage. This provides a detailed and holistic insight into agroforestry in India and reduces transaction costs by removing barriers like excessive paperwork. The Government of India already has a single-window platform called e-Green Watch, which automates and streamlines processes related to plantation and forestry activities. Emerging technologies can be linked to existing digital infrastructure like e-Green Watch to accelerate adoption.

Attempts in Indian policy to adopt emerging technologies  

The Department of Electronics and Information Technology, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, already has a draft IoT policy that outlines different applications of IoT in the country. Given the potential benefits of these technologies in the forestry sector, robust pilots are necessary to inform the policy and design measures to integrate smart technologies into Indian forest management. At the same time, the capacities of the Indian forest management system must be improved to apply these technologies. Decades of field data collected by Indian foresters can be harnessed to scale the use of these technologies.

Indo-German development cooperation is making preliminary attempts to support stakeholders in applying emerging technologies for forest and biodiversity management. For example, the Indo-German Biodiversity Programme, commissioned by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and implemented by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH together with the Himachal Pradesh Forest Department (HPFD), is developing a Long-Term Ecological Monitoring (LTEM) system. The LTEM is an online database system that aims at understanding the dynamics of forest ecosystem and developing appropriate management strategies. For instance, the system helps forest managers identify areas of grazing pressures and assesses Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFP) potential and use. Over the next few years, Indo-German development cooperation will focus on developing dedicated pilots where the use of emerging technologies for forest landscape restoration, sustainable forest management, and trees outside forests will be demonstrated.

The improved accuracy and transparency from using advanced digital tools will make it more attractive for private-sector players and landowners to participate in national forest management. This will raise the value of standing trees and forests, increase finance flows, and usher in a new era of forestry in India, thereby supporting India in meeting its national and international commitments on climate change and forestry.

Saurab Babu, Junior Advisor, Climate Change and Circular Economy, GIZ India Kundan Burnwal, Senior Advisor, Climate Change and Circular Economy, GIZ India

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ET Edge Insights, its management, or its members

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