Reporting illegal forest clearance

In south-west Cameroon, locals have watched as large swaths of their land have been destroyed. A similar plight affects many who live in the forests of the Congo basin, whose lands have been depleted by illegal logging, mining, industrial plantations and even by strict conservation activities, which often resulted in large-scale evictions of people from the environments they had populated for generations. In many cases, the problem lies in the fact that these forest lands are largely unmapped, so loggers and farmers can claim they were unoccupied. But another problem lies with reporting – people who witness illegal activities in the forests might live hundreds of miles from the nearest police station, or even telephone. To address this, the Rainforest Foundation UK is trialling an initiative that equips local communities to report illegal activities in their own forests in real time, using satellite phones and specially designed mapping software. ForestLink, which has funding from the Department for International Development, allows local people who witness illegal behaviour in the forest to report it in a few clicks of a button. The reports, which are geo-tagged, are sent to a centralised database and local partner organisations can then go out and confirm the incident. The speed of reporting is key as an oft-cited reason for inaction by authorities is “the very long time between the observation of illegal activities, verification and receipt of an external independent observation report”. The technology could revolutionise forest protection strategies by local people to play a much more active role in protecting their forests. By 2016, the programme has been trialled in Cameroon, Ghana, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Peru.