Recomendaciones y necesidades para el establecimiento de un programa marina costero en el Caribe de Centroamérica basado en los resultados del I Taller sobre Problemática de la Zona Marino Costera del Caribe de Centroamérica

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.

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.

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.

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 Jamaica Conservation and Development Trust has been actively engaged in reforestation and conservation efforts in the Blue and John Crow Mountains National Park, with the goal of maintaining and enhancing the remaining areas of closed and disturbed broadleaf forest and protecting the plant and animal species that exist there. 

Key activities include employing community members for planting and forest restoration, ongoing seedling collection, and refurbishing nurseries to increase capacity. We have planted over 300 acres of degraded land with native trees, and created and maintained 3.5 km of firebreaks. 

Innovative approaches such as piloting an early fire detection system using LoRa technology have been implemented. Our strategic approach also involves partnering with others to conduct studies that guide the preparation of conservation strategies and plans, linking conservation plans to visitor management plans for key sites, and promoting research to guide the implementation of conservation programs. 

Other effective area-based conservation measures (OECMs) are sites outside protected areas that deliver effective and long-term in situ conservation of biodiversity. Biodiversity conservation may be the primary objective of the site, a secondary objective of a site that is managed for other purposes, or it may be an unintended consequence of the way the site is managed. OECMs may be governed and managed by governments, private entities or Indigenous peoples and local communities, or a combination of these. This tool guides an assessor through three steps to apply eight criteria which determine if a site qualifies as an OECM as set out under the Convention on Biological Diversity. For sites which do not currently meet all the criteria, the tool serves to highlight areas where further information or improvements in governance and management are required.