The Internet of Wildlife: Technology and the Fight Against Biodiversity Loss and Climate Change

original english version

In August 2019, wildfires -- many started intentionally -- consumed large swathes of the Amazon rainforest, reducing the planet's "lung capacity," making indigenous peoples and wildlife homeless, and releasing massive amounts of greenhouse gases. On the other side of the world in September, forests burned in Indonesian Borneo and Sumatra. Likewise, human agency is widely suspected as palm oil growers clear jungle to make way for their crops. Massive bushfires are currently raging in eastern Australia, which experienced its hottest summer on record in 2018/19.

Wildfires are also occurring in the far north, increasing in frequency and intensity: in June 2019 (the hottest on record for the region), Arctic fires emitted 50 megatons of carbon dioxide — equivalent to Sweden's total annual carbon dioxide emissions. Arctic permafrost is melting faster than previously expected, which will only exacerbate the carbon release problem.

Why is the world apparently fiddling while Rome burns?

The tendency of national governments to focus on the short term, addressing the immediate and deferring long-term problems to successive governments or generations, is not helpful when confronted with planet-scale problems such as climate change and biodiversity loss. That’s because incremental “business as usual” campaigns can run into irreversible tipping points that push the system unexpectedly into new undesirable states (Amazon is an increasingly pressing example).

Although supranational bodies such as the United Nations and the European Union have attempted to see such issues in a broader perspective, a rise in nationalism worldwide in recent years has led to suspicion and even rejection of such institutions, often accompanied by a distrust of scientific evidence. den demote. and expertise.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the field of science and technology that can help combat biodiversity loss and climate change. In this article, we provide an overview of the current state of IoT and examine some examples of its use in fragile ecosystems.

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