TRANSCRIPT 🔗
Introduction [00:00:02] Welcome to the Global Development Institute podcast, based at the University of Manchester, we are Europe's largest research and teaching institutes addressing poverty and inequality. Each episode will bring you the latest thinking, insights and debates in development studies.
Johan Oldekop [00:00:26] My name is Johan Oldekop and I lead the Sustainable Forest Transitions Project, a five year research program studying the changing nature of forest cover and human development across the world. We're based at the University of Manchester's Global Development Institute. In this episode, we bring you the panel debate from our project launch at the Manchester Museum. We are very fortunate to have been joined by photographer Kieran Dodds, Polyanna da Conceição Bispo, Felipe Melo, Adithya Pradeep and Rose Pritchard. I learned a lot from the debate and I hope you do too.
Johan Oldekop [00:01:06] All right. Well, hi. Welcome, everyone. Thank you very much for making it to our launch of the Sustainable Forest Transitions Project. My name is Johan Oldekop. I am a reader in environment and development at the Global Development Institute and I'm the research lead for this new, and what I think, because I'm biased, very exciting five year research program that will be looking at studying reforestation and what it means for forest communities around the world.
I'm also your host for this evening. So our theme for tonight is The Future of Forests, and I'm very grateful to our guests, photographer Kieran Dodds over there, who will be talking, about his work on church forests in Ethiopia. And also to our panellists. Polyanna Bispo, Felipe Melo, Adithya Pradeep, and Rose Pritchard. And before asking Kieran to kick us off, I wanted to give us a quick overview, of the evening and also give us a little bit of a context about why forests and forest-dependent people and communities are so important for all of our futures. So why forests? Well, forests are home to 80% of the world's plants and animals, and they regulate the world's climate through these incredible atmospheric rivers, which are essentially like rivers in the sky that take moisture and Earth from one part of the planet to another. So, for example, the Amazon rainforest, helps to regulate rainfall in North America.
Johan Oldekop [00:02:39] So it's very important for the regulation of our planet. And they, of course, also sequester carbon, like a lot of carbon. In fact, forests sequester about 16 billion tons of carbon per year, which is equivalent to about one, 16 billion decker buses. Double decker buses. Forests are currently the best technology that we have available to us to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. And restoring forests across the world could really help us to tackle both the climate and biodiversity crisis by generating habitats for plants and animals and soaking up to 25% of our carbon emissions. But of course, forests are much, much more than animals, climate and carbon. They are home to millions of people around the world who depend on forests directly for food, food, fuel and medicines.
It's therefore not surprising that many of us, both here in the UK and abroad, have very deep personal connections to forests, and this connection is something that Kieran will be talking about in a minute. Unfortunately, forests are not really in very good shape at the moment. So forests once covered about half of the Earth's landmass, but this has now been reduced to approximately a third, and we continue to lose large amounts of forest to deforestation and more recently, also to climate change. So, for example, the last year we've seen unprecedented droughts in the Amazon rainforest, which leads to both tree mortality and forest fires. But there's some good news, too. And that's the part that we're excited about. And I hope you too. Some areas of the world have seen huge increases in tree cover, Chile, Uruguay, India, parts of the Atlantic Rainforest and Brazil and China have seen large increases in forests, over the last decade. And in 2021, governments, philanthropists and private organisations from around the world met in Glasgow and pledged to protect and restore forests and committed more than $22 billion to supporting forests and forest communities.
But what leads to long lasting increases in forest cover? Is that only tree planting in its initiatives or are there other more environmentally friendly and perhaps socially just ways of reforesting the planet? Like for example, giving back lands to indigenous peoples? And how different are new forests to old forests? And how are the lives of people being affected by the forests that are growing back? These are really important questions, and ones that we will be answering with our new Sustainable Forest Transitions Project. These questions are important because forests and trees are undoubtedly part of our climate and Biodiversity Solutions toolkit, but also because hundreds of millions of people, mostly indigenous peoples and local communities who have been politically and economically marginalised, live in areas that have been earmarked for reforestation. So if we want to get reforestation right, and we really do need to get it right, we need to get it to work for the people on whose lands forests are growing back. And we are now in a unique position to answer these important questions about reforestation, because we have more data on forests and people than we have ever had. We've seen technical, technological advances in the last ten years that have revolutionised forest monitoring.
We have satellite based systems that offer real time data on forest cover and deforestation and vegetation changes that facilitate accurate health assessments. Drones equipped with laser technology can provide detailed ground level monitoring, creating high resolution 3-D maps for terrain and tree structure analyses. We have AI and machine learning that
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automates data analysis from satellites that recognise patterns and anomalies for early threat detection. And we might even be able to use these data to predict where reforestation is going to be working the best. These technological strides could empower scientists, policymakers and local communities and really have the potential to revolutionise global forest conservation and restoration. And in parallel, technological advances in how information is collected and stored has made it easier for governments and international organisations like the World Bank to share data on poverty and human well-being. And because we can now pinpoint the location of these data, we can combine them with fast data, giving us the opportunity to measure changes in forest cover and poverty in parallel, over time and over very large areas. And it is these advances in data that make our Sustainable Forest Transitions program feasible.
So what are the themes for tonight? Well, we'll be covering our connection to forests and the role of arts and journalism. We'll be talking about carbon and biodiversity markets and also about the importance of rights to land and data for forest communities. I think it's very easy to feel despair about the state of the world, but we have more tools available to us than we have ever had before to both understand the world, but to also change it. We are really at the beginning of the United Nations Decade for Ecosystem Restoration. Making real, long lasting change for people and planet will require governments, communities, and the private sector to work together. And that is my vision and my hope for the future of forests. And here I'd like to quote from Hannah Ritchie, who's at the University of Oxford, who's just published a book called Not the End of the world. And in it, she says, we can be the first generation to create a sustainable world. So I'd like to invite our panellists, please, to join Kieran on the panel.
Johan Oldekop [00:08:23] To give you a quick round of introductions. Kieran is an award winning photographer and much of his personal work is focused on environment and culture. Polyanna is a senior lecturer at the University of Manchester's Geography department and uses satellite imagery for much of a research on forests. Felipe is an associate professor at Nottingham Trent University, and his research focuses on managing and restoring human and natural systems. Adithya is the founder of Jeev, a Start-Up on a mission to conserve and restore 2 million hectares of land through equitable natural capital projects by 2030. And last but not least, Rose is a presidential research fellow at the Global Development Institute and co-leads a new five year research program on how we can use satellite images and drones in socially just ways.
Johan Oldekop [00:09:15] So, my first two questions are directed at Rose and Kieran. So I think you really, really highlighted this importance of direct connection to the environment of conservation. But your photographs give us a glimpse of other people's connections or, in a way, help us to connect to forests that are far away. So I guess my first question is, what are the things that we can do closer to home to gain greater connection to forests?
Rose Pritchard [00:09:52] Hi, everyone. I mean, it's a big question. I think the meaning, the biggest thing we can do is create opportunities for people actually to be out in the environment to to have these first hand engagements with nature, with forests. I think we see when young people in particular have opportunities to be out in forests, so through programs like forest schools, through programs like Duke of Edinburgh's Award, to actually spend time indoors while the country national parks, it does have a genuinely transformative effect because it introduces them to spaces that they otherwise wouldn't be able to be in, to new ways of being in the environments. So a lot of this is how do we actually overcome those access barriers? In particular, there are people who struggle to get into these sorts of spaces for reasons of money, for reasons of disability, for example. So programs like Miles without Stiles in the national parks has been really, really valuable in terms of opening up spaces to wheelchair users or to people with mobility challenges who wouldn't otherwise be able to to reach many of these places that we value. So I think overcoming those access barriers and creating opportunities for people to get out into forests is probably one of the biggest things that we can do.
Kieran Dodds [00:11:06] Yeah. If you work in the city centre of Manchester just get out in the forest and spend time there. Feel that connection. Observing stuff. Just slowing down, I think, is a really good way to sort of build it up. And I was reflecting, actually, on why I got obsessed about trees and it was just doing that, just going out into it and things. Like it was a weekend volunteers group I went on before some higher exams, which I probably shouldn't have, and we just spent the day ripping out seedlings from a bulb because they weren't meant to be there. And that was great fun as a teenager. So things like that, which you can go and do and it just gets you and gets you radicalised in the way of trees.
Johan Oldekop [00:11:40] And so just going back to kind of keeping the theme on the arts and connection, what role do you think that the arts can play in helping us connect better and perhaps think more strategically? What do you think institutions like the Arts Council or museums and universities can do to help us establish these better actions?
Kieran Dodds [00:12:03] Yeah. I mean, that was kind of the point of, again, the stories that were made, that humans function and need stories to live. Good stories get to the core of meaning and dignity. And so they have a huge part to play. I think that's how we understand the stories of the forest. And that may be books or music or like,
images and music or films or documentaries. I think it is so vital. And I think the university thing is really interesting. I think having artists involved in research, I mean, all my stories are based on scientific research that someone else has done and it's in collaboration usually with the scientists. And I think that there's such an opportunity to get more artists in, and artists are mainly skint. So it's also a beneficial thing and encourages (inaudible), but also is a way to to transfer your amazing knowledge and experiences and bring it to a wider audience. So I think there is huge scope for that at Manchester University that we probably do already. It's another way to just encourage the artists to tell those stories.
Rose Pritchard [00:13:20] Yeah. I mean I think we often tend to treat the arts and ecology as separate things and forget that there's so many entanglements between the two, the kind of forests or environments, the sort of source of artistic inspiration going back centuries, but also much more direct kind of physical connections between forests and the arts. So, yeah, I'm a musician, I play oboe, I don't play very well. I spend a lot of time sounding a bit like a duck, but I have a nice time doing that. Oboes are mostly made of a tree species called African blackwood or (inaudible), which grows in countries like Tanzania. And so I found myself working in a forest context where I'm seeing these trees that are the source of the instrument that I play back home and the ways that I engage artistically. So we've got all of these interconnections between these two areas that often stay invisible, that often go unseen. And so people don't realise that the arts that they really value are embedded in environments and quite often in forests, that these two things aren't separable. I think also the arts have a huge amount of power when it comes to kind of sense making and particularly making sense of environmental change, because we are seeing such rapid changes in environments now, it's easy to feel like you just can't find your feet, that you can't keep track of how fast the world is changing around you. And so I know the museum offers things like climate cafes that actually help people think about these processes of change together. And making art together, I think, can be so valuable when you're trying to just understand these shifts in the worlds that you're living in and dealing with things like sometimes ecological grief or building ecological optimism.
Johan Oldekop [00:15:00] Thank you. So I want to move on to a question around indigenous peoples. And these questions are I guess addressed to both Felipe and Kieran. We often tend to romanticise wilderness as being devoid of humans. But most of the landscapes of the world have been modified by humans to some extent. So approximately 12% of the world's forests are managed by indigenous peoples and local communities. And this is even higher in the tropics and subtropics, and
in Brazil, for example, it's about 20% of the Brazilian Amazon is under, as part of indigenous territories. So these areas are not managed locally with an intent to address global climate change, and its effects in distant areas of the world. They're really about trying to manage to address the needs of local communities. So how do areas managed by indigenous peoples fit in the new global demand for forest restoration? And how can we ensure that indigenous peoples can be part of that decision making process? So, Felipe, perhaps you can start with that one.
Felipe Melo [00:16:12] Yep. Well, thank you very much for this invitation. I would say first that indigenous people and local communities don't really need forest restoration. And one can imagine that it's part of this romanticised view of indigenous landscapes. However, this is just part of the story. Yes, some indigenous communities have been managing their landscape for millennia in biodiversity, as their water resources, their wood, everything is there, the spiritual connectivity, everything is there. However, there are many indigenous communities that are being displaced and evicted from the motherland, their ancestral territories. And when these people are displaced, they luckily settle in another landscape, probably a degraded area that will probably need restoration. So most of the restoration now it's focused on this big market agenda of carbon and global climate change. And two little restoration is intended to rebuild connections between people in nature, that values food and water first for that people and then eventually it can contribute to the problems we created as Western society. And they can help us to to to solve this kind of problem. So yes, there is a lot of room for restoration in these indigenous communities, but not only is, time great for restoration in the other side, there is also the traditional local knowledge that can help us to restore our forests. So there are lots of examples, in Brazil, for example, related to restoration run by Women's Associations that collect seeds and provide seeds to nurseries. And they are part of the this market now and, this in it. These seeds are not just a product, you know, like, that you just buy from a company, they are are buying from a community that knows exactly where to collect seeds, how to store them, how to put them together, and how to plant them. So this is just a few examples of how indigenous local communities can connect to restoration. So yes, we need to pay attention on one side to restore the lands of indigenous people that were eventually displaced or, have their lands, had their lands, occupied and damaged by many different kinds of activities not related to the original culture. And on the other side, we must look at these people as a source, as incredible sources of knowledge, techniques and values for forests rather than only carbon or this, well, I recognise it's important now in our capitalist world, but
yes, there is a sort of counter movement of restoring forest not only to solve problems that we created, but to really improve their struggle in their identity, which is such a source of inspiration for all of us, all these kinds of connections we are trying to re-establish, maybe as just visiting these communities and getting to know them like Kieren did it. It's a source of inspiration, much more important sometimes then just sightseeing, tourism and these kind of things that we usually do. So yes, there is room for restoration in many different ways and we need to pay attention specific to this, the needs of these indigenous peoples, and local communities when doing restoration.
Johan Oldekop [00:20:15] Thanks Felipe. Kieran, my question for you is, I guess related to media. So how can we highlight, do you think, to large audiences that humans not only modify landscapes in negative ways, but in the case that you are showing, traditional practices have shaped areas that we consider wild.
Kieran Dodds [00:20:34] The thinking in my own country, these perceptions of Scotland as wild and it's just a depopulated landscape. It's just a clear landscape. And I feel like there's something happening in Scotland just now that is a real shift in the imagination, it is a battlefield of ideas, actually, trying to get people to not romanticise the empty wilderness, of sporting estates that are 200 years old, and bringing the rewilding, and there's a battle of ideas there. And I feel like in, it's just classic, but it's because people are polarised from the landscape of rural, urban, this is seen in the debates between rewilding and traditional land owning. So I do feel it is a space for nuanced discussions and bringing people together to bridge that gap in the imagination. Because art is so important, and journalism is so important, and writing these stories, because people want the stories, they want to bridge the gap. How can we have something that is (inaudible), but also have people enjoying nature flourishing? How can these things coexist? And they've just been given two options, at the minute. And so I feel like the role of the arts and the role of journalism is to weave these stories together. My most recent thing I've been working on is photo weaving. Physically doing that, literally chopping up pictures of traditional and rewilding and physically weaving them together to create a dialogue and discussion. And I don't know what effect that will have, but it's led some tourist spats and people imploding, but I feel like slowly, slowly these conversations hopefully are in good cheer. But get people offline and in person from these different views to help bridge that imagination gap. I think that is.... yeah, the role of journalism and the arts.
Johan Oldekop [00:22:28] And I guess just to kind of follow up on that. I mean, some of these spaces, these, I guess Conservation Frontiers, for example, in the Amazon most recently, have become extremely
dangerous places to document. Right. So, we saw, for example, murders of journalists, British and Brazilian journalists, a couple of years ago. So how can we make sure that journalists are protected in the work that they do, and what role does society and the government have in that? Sorry, that's a big question.
Kieran Dodds [00:23:11] Yeah. I think you need journalists and there's a dying breed, because you could get journalists into universities, but I think there's this awkwardness there, with the university, because ultimately they are Mavericks. But also, yeah, forget the stories out there. So I think there was a need for an independent news to report these things. To think that (inaudible), but that seems to be more research-based. So there's a real paradigm shift in news. And how to protect them? I mean, it's just dangerous what they're doing, but there's also... I mean, it's yeah, a lot of journalists around the world who are killed, on the environmental frontline, but in so many other ones, as well, in conflicts. So how do you protect them? In all of these times they take the risk because they think it's worth taking. Just let them know that they-especially as freelancers-they've got financial backup, which again comes back to support and news sources that would do that. But then also just encouraging smaller concept creators. Influencers. I seem to get a bit obsessive in looking at videos of rewilding with beavers in North America. Because the fur trade, they killed all the beavers didnt they? So when you rewild, it helps wildfires and stuff. So there's people out there like supporting actual content creators online, because it's not just the dangerous front line. I've always spent my career behind the front, sometimes in conflict zones, but not doing the conflict. So I think there's a great scope to do that. You don't just have to support the Guardian, for example, other news sources are available, but you could also support person to person. Like people who buy my book. Honestly. What huge support! Genuinely, I can support my family and make books. And that is a huge thing just... you can really support individuals. Like this - people in a room! Speaking to you.
Felipe Melo [00:25:06] Can I add a few words to that? Yeah, that was just, this is a very important question because it's it has to do with clan conflict, most of these murders and this killing, in these remote areas, natural areas of the world have to do with land tenure, land rights. And one of the main effective measures is to support these people's struggle. So write about it, unequivocally support the land tenure of the traditional people. Because these kills happen because these people are being evicted, put in slavery, co-opted to, you know, drug dealing, illegal activities because they need to find a way to live. Something that would never happen if they had their land tenure, their lives, right, secured by public policies and international support. Governments,
money, of course, everything you know, so actually it's struggling the same and is reinforcing the same fight the journalists were trying to do. We need to do this as well. I mean, speak directly, unequivocally, holding governments and politics accountable for these deaths because they are, they are happening because exactly these journalists were playing a very important role in supporting these people's struggle. So there is no way of avoiding these rather than supporting even more, these people's struggle to for their lands.
Johan Oldekop [00:26:40] So I'd like to I'd like to move on to to data. We are a research team after all. So we can measure forests in more detail than ever now with new satellite images and drones. These satellite images and drones also become much more user friendly. Right. So we've got all of these platforms that we can access, and NGOs and governments who know the communities can monitor forests. So my next question is given that we have now a whole host of forest monitoring products, how different are the stories that these different products are telling us about forests?
Polyanna da Conceição Bispo [00:27:22] Thank you. Thank you Johan. So talking about about data sets. So the different stories, they say different stories, right? Thinking about, the remote sensing part of it. You saw one story, or maybe Kieran told one story with photographs. Photographs, a type of data. We have satellites, and the satellites have, we have different types of sensors. I'm not going to enter into the techniques parts of it, but for example, we have the optical data sets. That's the data that you see in your Google. You know, the internet, right, it's intuitive. So with this data you can cover stories, such as what's the phenology, what's the health of the forests in Wichita, what's going on or changing over time. Everything in space and and time as well. Ten years ago we're talking about sensors, satellites. Now with automation we talk about constellations of satellites. (Inaudible). And these together with artificial intelligence now is becoming, like, very powerful, very accessible. Okay. So we have them for the photographs. We have the optical data sets. We have greater data sets and type of data sets with another story and a story about the structure of forests, because is more sensitive to show it in structure. So it tells you the story of how is the biomass, and for the biomass of the forest, how you can calculate carbon. You can estimate it and you can use these products for example, climate models and things like that. Then you have the LiDAR principle, with greater use of this kind of macro microwave, it can penetrate the forests, different forests. And that's why I could give you a lot of information on the biomass and structure and things like that. Differently from the optical you have the LiDAR. That's the laser scanner. Right. These laser then these gives you beautiful - unfortunately cannot show - but beautiful images of a forest in 3D. So you can have this from the top. And you can have this from inside now because you have, you can use drones, but inside of the forest you have the terrestrial laser scanner. And it can map all the leaves, branches and things like that. These allow you to tell another story that's not only above the structure, but also the habitats in a more fine scale, like what's happening with the density of the branches. Thinking about, for example, birds, how we can characterise these types of habitats so we can tell these different stories. I'm talking here about different scales, as well, like you can map. There's more things happening in in the context of of the tree. The tree using remote sensing and also what happened in the global scale, thinking about climate modelling, for example. Right. And just an example, I get excited about this, but another example that is quite interesting, that's quite exciting actually. For example, thinking about the images that Kieran showed, the forests, the churches, right, like in the last two years with artificial intelligence and new high resolution data sets, first you can get data with five metres resolution, like, I will say, the main planet data for example, that is a data set that's free available now for the tropics. And with this type of data you can count, you can calculate, you can see and count trees. So we're talking about trees outside forests. You can count how much trees. Count carbon. What is the contribution of these trees outside and also the tree inside forests. And through this data, tell stories connecting as well to communities and things like that. So many things linked. Yeah. So many stories.
Johan Oldekop [00:31:56] I mean, I want to just pick up on this, this point that we raised that essentially we can now map forests or any part of whether it's forests or not, at such high resolution that we can identify individual trees and announce it. So my question for Rose is, how can we ensure that these data sets don't perpetuate some of the injustices against indigenous peoples and local communities? So how can we use data in good ways and avoid using data in bad ways?
Rose Pritchard [00:32:37] I'm going to start this off in a very unpromising way by saying, I don't know. But there is a good reason why we don't know. And I think the reason for that is that the technology is moving so fast and so remote sensing technologies have come so fast. Artificial intelligence has come on so fast. And like the tech companies are really pushing, pushing, pushing boundaries. And a lot of ways that is fantastic. But what we haven't done so much of is asked, what does this mean for the ways that lands are governed? What does this mean for the people who live in forested lands? And there's a few different reasons why we should care about this. And one of them is that even though data are fantastic, they're still going to be a partial representation of the landscape. And as these data
become more accessible, as they become more open to lots of people who've never been to these places, lots of people are going to get this power to tell stories about landscapes, and we need to make sure that the stories they're telling don't overwhelm the stories of the people who actually live in these forested lands. And because we know that the stories people tell shape the politics that then shape the governance of forests, which then shape the lives that people are able to live in these lands, their well-being, their rights, their values, and the extent to which they're happy and they can live the lights that they want to lead. So this is a very immediate social justice question. And I think also, as the technology advances, it raises these really, really important questions about: do people know how they're being governed? If you're moving the governance of land to automated technologies, to governance by algorithms, which I mean, I study these and I don't always know how they work. So how can you have participatory decision making? How can you have lawful power? How can you have community involvement when you've got these increasingly complicated technologies, which are shaping the ways we understand forests and the ways that we govern forests? And because we haven't done enough of the research yet, we don't have specific answers for those questions. But we do have really good examples and things about kind of transparency and algorithms, transparency in terms of what data can and can't tell us. We've got really interesting examples of how can you blend satellite data with more local understandings of landscapes? How can you work with local people to create maps together? How can you help people? How can you provide local people with the capacities, the resources they need to use these technologies to tell their own stories about landscapes? So, they're starting to work around things like community drones, where people actually are filming their own and they're telling their own stories. With these kinds of technologies. So it is a super important area, and it's a super important research topic because we don't have answers. And there is that risk that the technologies run away ahead of us, and you end up disempowering the rural peoples that actually you're hoping to empower.
Polyanna da Conceição Bispo [00:35:35] Thank you for this. Just to add to what you've said as well. Yes, the technology is amazing. And again, it's going very fast. Everything's going too fast. But another thing of that to mention that is very important is we don't have the answers. But one thing that we need to take into consideration is because it's very accessible, the decision makers, the politics, they have access to that. And sometimes they can manipulate as well because this data's big and there is a lot of uncertainty that's associated with it. When you think about, we're going to talk about this later on, so I won't speak about carbon biodiversity, things
like that. If you use estimations, estimation of the simulations, they are about the real, real thing. And we need the knowledge of the local community to support and to show, like you mentioned, these stories because there is many we don't know the answers, but we see made decisions made, based on datasets that have huge uncertainties in the mapping. So this is, this is something very, very important. It's very important what you are doing with the research as well.
Johan Oldekop [00:36:53] Thank you. So I want to move on to, to kind of thinking a little bit about data, and some of the applications. So I want to talk about data and markets. And I'd like to invite Adithya and Polyanna to comment on this. So we've heard a lot about carbon and more recently also biodiversity markets. So I'd like to ask Adithya who's kind of working on this, what are they and why are they important for reforestation administration?
Adithya Pradeep [00:37:25] Cool. So firstly, thanks for having me Johan. It's an honour to be among academics. And the only one who's not, but, me. But yeah, so the issue with our current market economy is the fact that it fails to account for our negative costs of carbon emissions, of the destruction of biodiversity at the moment. Nature markets are an attempt to rectify that and to mobilise private capital in support of nature restoration. The funding gap for nature today stands at about 750 billion a year. The amount we invest into nature is about 150 billion a year, and almost all of that money comes from governments. The public sector cannot and should not be solely responsible for footing the bill on this. And nature markets are basically an attempt to create a business case for investing into nature and on the other side, for communities on the ground, making it economically feasible to make a respectable living out of restoring forests, rather than being forced by economic pressures to clear them for alternate sort of land use. So that's that's essentially why nature markets are important and we need to get it right.
Johan Oldekop [00:38:56] So related to data. I guess, Poly you were just talking about this and also kind of considering that uncertainty... So we can use satellite images, and satellite constellations now to, to measure carbon and monitor deforestation. So how can these data be used to support carbon and biodiversity markets?
Polyanna da Conceição Bispo [00:39:18] Okay. There is opportunities here. And there's a lot of challenges as well. And then we come back to what we started to talk about - uncertainties. Right. So the opportunities in terms of carbon markets and biodiversity is that now again we have an amount of free available data to have. When I did my PhD I bought the image and I bought everything, and they bought the software to run the image. I did a four year PhD with one image. So now we have like so many images and everybody like my, my nephew, he can play with so many images for free, free and valuable software to play around. Anyway, just show how the things are changing so fast, right? So fast. Because I'm very young. (Laughter). So, then about about the carbon market, the thing is like, you have so many data so you can do a lot of simulations, you can do a lot of modelling, you can use some fugu data to do that and the risks and things like that and monitor these over time. Those who could not have done this ten years ago, now we can do that. But again, those strategies are huge. Sometimes with the methodology you don't have the transparency, especially for dealing with markets. You don't you don't have the transparency for this and how it is produced. And in general, you don't have this uncertainty because you generate a simulation for conservation. You need to have the certainty associated to that, to each of that data. And sometimes this data is not linked and is not explicit. And then this is used to make sometimes wrong decisions. And thinking about also carbon, sometimes we have this kind of conflict, okay, carbon, but we're thinking about biodiversity or think carbon by percent. So you can get carbon from crops, from monocultures, from agro forest. That is interesting as well. But we're talking about forestation for regeneration, restoration. But we're thinking about massive forests. We're thinking about ecosystem services, how the forest is socially as well, or simply we're thinking about carbon accounting. Right. So this is something that needs to be taken into consideration as well. We don't have the answers like yes, it's good or it's not good, but we have a place to discuss and to actually like you said, make the right decisions.
Johan Oldekop [00:42:11] Thank you. Adi, do you have any thoughts on that? Because you, of course, use these data. I mean, we research these data, we use them for research, but you use these data in a completely different way.
Adithya Pradeep [00:42:22] Yeah. So, I mean, I think there's a lot of opportunities and a lot of challenges as well. But three kind of high level opportunities come to mind. Right? So the first is around enhancing trust. If you've been following the news around forestry carbon markets in the last year, you know that there's been so many scandals. And satellite imagery provides an independent third party data source that allows investors who are investing into these projects, but also other third parties to verify that the impacts that projects are claiming are in fact true. Right. So that's one sort of major area of opportunity. The other is thinking about the projects itself, right. The barriers to entry, to entering and accessing financing through the forestry carbon market are incredibly high. It takes five years from the start to the point that a project starts to generate a reliable stream of credits. It takes about $1 million in upfront investments leading up to that point, which essentially means that these projects are only accessible to very large
scale projects. What technology can do - satellite imagery in particular, and all of the sort of machine learning on top of that - is to compress the time needed to design interventions to measure the kind of outcomes and the projections that people make about recovery, and basically compress the time to market, and the time that it takes for projects to access financing from five years now to, say, six months. So that's sort of another kind of major area. The final thing that comes to mind is about prioritising investments, right? So looking at spatial patterns allow you to detect, you know, areas which might be at most risk of deforestation or degradation. And channel investments and interventions into areas which are most at risk. Also, you know, it's sort of helpful to identify the highest priority areas for restoration. So, for example, you might be better served channelling $1 million to a project which might help connect to critical habitats than $1 million invested elsewhere. So that's sort of another area of opportunity. Now coming to the challenges, I think, been touched upon by both Poly and Rose. So the first is kind of auditing this tech, right? So you've got Start-Ups building technology which allows you to estimate the kind of aboveground biomass in forests. Anyone can build those technologies, and put them out to market. How do you know if those estimates are accurate? If the kind of scientific methods that are being applied are robust, there is no kind of broadly accepted industry standards and bodies that audit the technology that's being put out there on the market. So that's a key challenge. The other is around the agency of local communities, which are also touched upon. So, like you said, it's super easy for me sitting in London to look at satellite imagery and decisions are being made on remote lands. How do you ensure that local communities have the kind of agency to shape the decision making, which will affect land use on lands that they live on? Right. So that's another. And finally, I guess, speaking about also broadening this discussion beyond carbon to biodiversity, you spoke about the challenges around measuring biodiversity exclusively from the top down. It's incredibly difficult, right, if not impossible, because to measure biodiversity reliably, you need to be able to look below the forest canopy. And there is a lot of interesting work being done on kind of looking at populations of land cover change and using that as predictors of species risk, extinction risk, for example. Also, I think an area of fear, like pushing the envelope on science, I mean, everything within a forest is interconnected, right? So clearly, stuff that impacts the biodiversity under the canopy must also be visible in, I guess, the colours of the canopy or the structure of the vegetation. So I think that's also an area for science to sort of push the envelope on understanding the interactions between these spatially explicit things and how they relate to biodiversity under the canopy. So, yeah, those are some challenges and opportunities.
Johan Oldekop [00:47:19] Thank you. I'd like to bring Felipe into the conversation. So I think we've already talked a little bit about some of the kind of data challenges, due to what Adi has said. But I do want to perhaps think a little bit more conceptually about, you know, the kind of challenges of thinking about forests and biodiversity as objects that you can trade in markets.
Felipe Melo [00:47:46] Yeah. So you have a particular vision about trade in nature. I understand the opportunities, I have been working in close relationship with NGOs, trying to. Yeah. Influenced by the early thinking on ecological economics. Well, because there is a difference in trade in nature. When you see nature as part of a big thing such as an economy, the nature comes into the economy. But there is another thing called the real ecological economy, which sees nature, not as part of the economy, but economy as a part of nature. So it flips everything, because when you see nature as part of the economy, the trade activity of nature will be ruled by the common system we are embedded in, like capitalism. So it has value and value changes. Value moves, investment moves. Just an example - I live in Nottingham, which used to be an industrial city. I can imagine people thinking in that time, well money's coming. Wow. Industry, fancy. The fact that the factories of (inaudible), people were happy, you know, everything vanished. There's nothing. The money went out. It's somewhere else. I mean, trading nature and money might come now and might leave later. And what do we do with what was traded before? We should probably cut nature, good forests. Because money went somewhere else. So when trading nature, I am always worried about trading in the business-as-usual capitalist way - I don't believe it would be a nice option for us. But if we try to trade nature in a different way, trading as value, trading as part of a superstructure where economy is embedded in... So putting limits to economy, limits to the growth, the infinite growth, we imagine that economy might grow and grow and grow. And I also critique zero growth, because the zero growth works for a small part of the the people in the world that already have their basic needs attended. There is a huge part of the world that needs growth. So maybe we should talk about distribution and even distribution of nature benefits, because even the benefits of nature are not evenly distributed. So I'm not going to go deep into this discussion because there is a lot of ideology, economy, and lot of things. But I am not shy about sharing my topic field, that I don't believe too much in trading nature in the business-as-usual way, but rather we should put nature in another perspective as something that we all are embedded in nature, into nature, even the economy. So it poses the limits, the values, and the way we should trade because, well, yeah, maybe we should trade, but trade in a different way. This is the kind of thing I see as positive thinking on trading nature.
Johan Oldekop [00:51:29] Thank you very much. I think I'm going to have to close it there. I would like to again thank Kieran and the panellists for really inspiring thoughts. And I would like to thank all of you for making it out on a on a Wednesday evening. I think you deserve a round of applause.
Johan Oldekop [00:51:50] Thank you for listening. If you'd like to stay updated about the research project and other podcasts, please subscribe to our newsletter and visit our web page at www.sites.manchester.ac.uk/SFTresearch.