In 2024, Distant Imagery Solutions planted 5.5 million mangroves in the UAE using self-engineered wooden drones designed for simplicity, adaptability, and cost-effectiveness. This milestone redefines the potential of community-driven, ecosystem-based restoration.
With projects ready in Brazil, Tonga, Kenya, and Indonesia, Distant Imagery empowers communities to lead. Our licensing and training platform equips locals to build and operate drones, fostering global knowledge exchange.
More than a technological solution, this is a movement of shared empowerment and stewardship. By connecting communities, Distant Imagery creates a global network innovating together to restore ecosystems and build climate resilience.
Also, our AI-powered Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) system tracks restoration progress and combats illegal activities, ensuring ecological recovery and long-term protection.
This standartised solution combines drone technology and an innovative allometric approach to monitor and assess crocodilian populations who face significant threats, leading to population declines with 50% the 27 crocodilian species are threatened, with 25% critically endangered. Drones equipped with high-resolution cameras capture images of even partially submerged crocodiles, allowing precise, non-invasive length estimates based on head-to-body allometric ratios. This method overcomes challenges like logistical constraints, cost, need for highly trained personnel, observer bias, detectability, wildlife disturbance, and safety risks of traditional surveys. By covering remote areas efficiently, the solution enhances biodiversity mo,nitoring, informs conservation strategies, and enables a wide range of additional information to be collected. This solution is very cheap, requiring minimal training, and accessible to a wide range of users, including indigenous peoples and local communities and conservation practitioners.
The Restoration Platform, the core of Forest Cloud, transforms global restoration by simplifying fundraising and ensuring transparency for forest conservation. Since 2018, it has evolved to bring back a trillion trees and conserve 3 trillion existing trees. The open-source, open access, digital solution currently supports scientific restoration initiatives as well as managing and coordinating conservation and restoration efforts globally. It benefits from robust Restoration Standards, proprietary restoration monitoring applications, a robust peer-review system and an ecosystem of ancillary digital solutions – the ‘Forest Cloud’. Proven across 300 restoration initiatives and growing, the Platform unifies restoration organizations (ROs), donors, and scientists. Having demonstrated its success by restoring over 94M trees in 6 years, we now seek to improve its scale and geographic reach and solve the logistical challenges to contribute to a sustainable, thriving future.
The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted in 2022, provides a framework for the effective implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) through four goals and 23 targets. Target 3 (known as the ‘30×30 target’) calls on Parties to conserve at least 30% of terrestrial, inland waters, and coastal and marine areas by 2030. These guidelines are designed to promote good practices relating to identifying, reporting, monitoring and strengthening OECMs. They are intended for use by a wide range of rightsholders and stakeholders to promote understanding of whether a site meets the CBD criteria for identifying an OECM, how to report OECM data at the national and global levels, and how to monitor and strengthen OECMs.
Tropical islands are home to unique floras, and host a vast number of endemic plant species. Threats have led to a significant population decrease in Hawaii, where 97% of these endemic plant species are listed as endangered, critically endangered, or extinct. Vertical cliff habitats work as refugia to protect plants from these threats. However, these habitats make conservation work particularly difficult, forcing botanists to use risky and time-consuming methods such as abseiling to access remote plant populations. We developed the Mamba, the first aerial system capable of sampling plants on cliffs. The system has allowed the collection of seeds from many critically endangered species including Hibiscadelphus woodii, as well as the recent discovery of a new species: Schiedea waiahuluensis. The conservation collections made by this tool are thriving in nurseries, demonstrating the impact on the conservation cycle for organisms located in difficult-to-reach environments, and the actions necessary to prevent plant extinction.
Ribbit is a citizen science web app that uses few-shot transfer machine learning to record, identify, and classify frog and toad calls, contributing crowdsourced data to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) to address data gaps, especially in the Global South. Identification apps offer significant potential for automatic in situ biodiversity monitoring (Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, 2022; Tuia et al., 2022; Nieto-Mora et al., 2023). Our app focuses on anurans, as they are crucial ecosystem indicators (Estes-Zumpf et al., 2022), with over 40% of the species at risk of extinction, and their unique vocalizations are ideal for acoustic identification. Beta testers revealed the app’s potential to contribute data to GBIF while empowering citizen scientists to engage in ecological monitoring. By creating an open-access platform for labeling biodiversity data, Ribbit enables conservation organizations to develop strategies for protecting vulnerable populations and preserving critical ecosystems.
La innovación, con base en la tecnología smartphone, ha cambiado drásticamente la manera en que podemos empoderar a las comunidades pesqueras y registrar información. Apps en los smartphones, Web-Apps en línea y las páginas web, permiten a un número ilimitado de usuarios acceder y participar en estudios científicos, analizar datos, contribuir y recibir información. Esto permite a la ciencia operar en escalas y velocidades previamente imposibles.
En esta solución, se presentan diferentes herramientas tecnológicas, utilizadas para fines de conservación y pesca sostenible, promoviendo la inclusión digital y modernizando al sector pesquero. Para ello, se creó una aplicación móvil (PescaData) para registrar datos pesqueros, intercambiar servicios y productos, y conectar a las comunidades pesqueras. Además, se impartió el primer curso en línea en idioma español sobre ordenamiento pesquero y se creó una plataforma para evaluar reservas marinas.
As the World Heritage Convention celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2022, over 1100 sites around the world are recognized as World Heritage – places that are so valuable to humanity that there conservation has been deemed our collective responsibility. Yet many of these exceptional places face increasing pressure from diverse types of development projects within and around the sites. Assessing the impacts of such projects is essential to both prevent damage to World Heritage and identify sustainable options. This Guidance and toolkit explains the process for achieving these goals. Offering practical tips and tools including checklists and a glossary, it provides a framework for conducting impact assessments for cultural and natural heritage sites.
Un objectif clé de ce guide est de recadrer l’EIC pour aider à soutenir la conservation de la nature et la réalisation des objectifs mondiaux en matière de biodiversité (aux côtés des objectifs climatiques et autres objectifs de développement sociétaux). Ce guide est centré sur la biodiversité et le développement éolien et solaire, et s’adresse principalement aux planificateurs gouvernementaux et aux promoteurs de projets. Cependant, étant donné qu’il est conçu pour aider à relever certains des défis existants de l’EIC, sa portée est potentiellement plus vaste.
The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted in 2022, provides a framework for the effective implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) through four goals and 23 targets. Target 3 (known as the ‘30×30 target’) calls on Parties to conserve at least 30% of terrestrial, inland waters, and coastal and marine areas by 2030. These guidelines are designed to promote good practices relating to identifying, reporting, monitoring and strengthening OECMs. They are intended for use by a wide range of rightsholders and stakeholders to promote understanding of whether a site meets the CBD criteria for identifying an OECM, how to report OECM data at the national and global levels, and how to monitor and strengthen OECMs.
The IKI-BMUKN funded project Transboundary conservation and sustainable management of coastal and marine biodiversity in Kwale, Kenya and Tanga, Tanzania supports the conservation of marine and coastal biodiversity through community-based and gender-inclusive approaches. To reduce pressure on mangrove ecosystems, the project introduced sustainable apiculture as an alternative livelihood for local communities in Kwale and Tanga. The mentorship training takes place in two parts: The first part focuses on beehive construction, colony management and honey production. The second part is delivered when the honey is ready for harvest and builds skills in processing and value addition, including the use of beeswax for making products such as candles and ointments. Through mentoring and inclusive training design, women who were previously excluded due to cultural taboos have now become active participants in beekeeping. The project supports both environmental protection and local income generation.
In Côte d’Ivoire, most local communities are barely involved in the valorisation of genetic resources like medicinal plants – beyond providing them as raw or minimally processed material. They are unaware of what happens to these resources beyond local markets.
This is compounded by deep-rooted mistrust, which can lead to community representatives not attending meetings. Thus, their resources are often used without their participation or them benefitting.
Improving the inclusion of local communities in valorisation has been a key pillar of the ABS Capacity Development Initiative. New approaches have led to promising results. In northeastern Côte d’Ivoire, the ABS Initiative piloted a model and successful integrated communities into the value chain for traditional medicine. The approach included engaging traditional and administrative authorities at every level, actively involving village residents, and using tools like picture cards and role-playing games, all while supporting the organisation of traditional healers.
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