Stopping Deforestation in Indonesia

The Indonesian rainforests have always been in danger of logging, but now Topher White, founder of the 'Rainforest Connection', San Fransisco, has come up with a plan...

Businesses like Envirophone and Mazuma are very well known, they recycle old mobile phones by removing valuable materials which, in bulk, can be sold off and reused. There may however be a new way of recycling old mobile phones, which will include throwing them into the rainforests of Indonesia.

The ingenious method drawn White is currently being tested. It involves taking donated phones, just like Mazuma etc and fitting them with specially designed solar panels which are designed to make the most of the brief spells of light on the rainforest floor. The phones will then be have software installed to recognize the low rumble of a chainsaw. After this has been dumped, the microphone will be left on, then the phone will be dumped in the rainforest, ready to alert White's team and the forest's rangers of illegal logging.

Although the would have to have microphones thus reducing the number of usable phones, this is a totally plausible plan. The phones would be virtually impossible to spot and even if the lumberjacks started to use axes, the phones could then be installed with new software to recognize those sounds, beside the fact that using an axe would be impractical, as it would reduce the money yielded from the wood because it takes more time and more physical labour.

The long term plan is to develop an app so that that Joe Blogs average could receive real-time notification about the illegal logging.

The test will involve 15 phones in the 25,000-hectare Air Tarusan reserve, western Sumatra. White hopes to gain a radius of 0.5km from each phone, which quickly works out at a lot cheaper than thought.

Indonesia loses around a million hectares of forest per year and although the country's rainforests are some of the worlds largest and harbour exotic species, it still does not change the fact that more than a half of Indonesia's forests have been cleared since the 1960s.

For further reading, please see this link, this link and this link.