Preserving and monitoring our forests with Wildsense
Announcing our lead investment in Wildsense — an end-to-end health monitoring platform for forests to detect, prevent and visualise sanitary and climate risks exposures.
This post was originally published on Oct 27th, 2021
It is common knowledge that deforestation and forest degradation have continued to take place at alarming rates worldwide, which inevitably contributes significantly to the ongoing loss of biodiversity as well as slowing down earth’s natural carbon sequestration process which is essential to our fight against climate change.
Between 2015 and 2020, the rate of deforestation was estimated at around 10 million hectares per year including both human and natural effects.
The “good” news is that the deforestation rate has continuously slowed down during the last decades, down from 16 million hectares per year in the 90’s. In the meantime around half of this deforestation is offset by regrowing forests, so overall we lose about five million hectares of forests each year.
As trees have largely proven to be humanity’s current best asset to maintain global warming and climate change at acceptable levels (through carbon sequestration), it was quite clear to us that preserving the existing forests should be a top priority and was a no-brainer in term of environnemental impact.
Deforestation isn’t the only challenge
Even though mankind’s footprint on forest is already quite a challenge to deal with, especially in developing countries, history proved us that past a certain stage reforestation policy tend to be implemented quite efficiently in order to regrow what was previously lost.
For example, China alone has accounted for 25 percent of the global increase in vegetation area since 2000, about half of which is from increase in forests.
However regrown forest as well as historical ones are not risk-free since global warming is still a thing and that forests remain a fragile ecosystem that needs to be preserved.
According to some recent studies around two thirds of the total forest biomass in the EU alone is potentially vulnerable to natural disturbances, including windstorms, forest fires and insect outbreaks.
To give you a rough idea about the potential “natural” damages we are talking about, bark beetles infested around 18 million cubic meters of timber in Czech Republic alone in 2018 — around 10 times the amount typically seen in previous years, mostly driven by global warming.
In 2019 it was reported that number nearly doubled to around 30 million cubic meters, costing Czech forest owners around $1.7 billion in damages.
Globally, more than 100 million hectares of forests are adversely affected every year by forest fires, pests, diseases, invasive species drought and adverse weather events. Global warming is likely to increase these natural disturbances, especially those from fires and insect outbreaks that are more sensitive to climate.
As a result, key forest ecosystem services such as carbon sequestration, erosion control, water regulation or wood supply, could be or are already seriously affected.
In this context, sustainable forest management strategies are of paramount importance to enhance the resilience of these fundamental elements.
The case for reforestation
Throughout the world, forestry projects have flourished over the past decades as they aim to preserve, restore or recreate forest ecosystems in order to strengthen their ecosystem services over the long term (CO2 storage, water filtration, soil retention, population well-being, etc.) by contributing to the strengthening of biodiversity and the socio-economic development of local populations.
However reforestation projects are not free of risks either and definitely liable to climatic hazards, fires or illnesses. Moreover, trees could simply also not survive their transplant/planting as it is estimated that the survival rate of newly planted trees tends to fluctuate between 65% to 40% with some projects going as low as 5%.
Despite widespread efforts to plant more trees, it is reported that only 18% of organisations mention monitoring at all, and only 5% mention measuring survival rate of plantings.
This is definitely something that should be taken into consideration as many reforestation projects have been leveraged as carbon compensation schemes for companies willing to reach net 0 emission.
Wildsense & why we invested
Wildsense aims to bring the power of data and satellite imagery to the preservation and monitoring of forests; aligning both the economical and ecological interests for forest regrowth projects as well as being able to detect sanitary and climate risks exposures for existing forests, potentially saving millions of hectares thanks to proactive field actions.
By using image processing models over satellite imagery Wildsense is able to provide foresters with critical informations needed in order to properly manage their forests against identified risks, like infested trees in the case of a spreading pests or areas that are under high hydric stress and vulnerable to forest fire.
On the specific case of carbon offsetting and reforestation, Wildsense’s technology could also serve as a certification mean for carbon credit buyers to ensure that the carbon they purchased is still where it is meant to be, bringing more transparency to a $200+ billion carbon market.
Wildense’s solution will eventually lead to the preservation of the forests biological ecosystem they will be monitoring — maintaining a bio-diverse and healthy forest ecosystem while assuring every forest stakeholder gets the right level of information.
At AFI Ventures, we believe in a world where innovation is a tool for positive change, the foundation to building a sustainable balance between economic growth and positive impact.
We commit to empowering entrepreneurs standing at the intersection of ‘for-profit’ and ‘for-good’, reimagining fairer & more sustainable ‘2.0’s for every sector of the economy — because we believe in the power of well-intentioned entrepreneurs to drive the big changes our society wants & needs. Wildsense is undoubtedly the perfect illustration of the above.