 It's kind of a frustrating subject, sometimes deforestation, because it's always a balance between this sort of global imperative that we actually save the forest and the fact that all of the work really has to happen locally. But I really do believe that technology plays a very important role in saving it. And I really do also believe that whether or not we save the rainforest is actually a defining challenge of our generation. And finally, most importantly, I think that we're lucky enough to live in a time when all of the necessary factors to accomplish that actually are sitting right in front of us, and we live with this great moment of convergence. But first I'm actually going to take us into the rainforest back to the first time I ever was there and sort of get a feel for what's there. In the summer of 2011, I visited the rainforest of Borneo for the very first time. And as you can imagine, it was actually the overwhelming sound that really struck me the most. There's this constant cacophony of noise, but some things actually do stick out. So for example, this is a hornbill, and this is a cicada, a Borneo cicada. And this is a family of gibbons that's calling to each other from a great distance. So the place where this is recorded actually is a gibbon reserve. And their actual goal is to take care of gibbons. They rehabilitate them and release them into the wild. But what I didn't realize at the time when I first visited this place was that what they actually have to spend a lot of their resources on is defending off illegal logging that's taking place on the periphery of their sanctuary. And in fact, if you turn down the sound of the rainforest and you turn up the sound of chainsaws, what I didn't realize at the time was that there was actually chainsaw noises in the background the entire time. The sound of the forest blocked that sound very, very well. It's very difficult for people to be able to find it. And one day we actually went walking off in the forest and stumbled upon some illegal loggers that were operating on the border of the sanctuary. The guards were completely unaware of it because similar to us they did not hear the chainsaws over the sound of the forest. And this is when it struck me that actually protecting the forest might not be something that people should be responsible for on their own. But I'm going to back up a second and just talk about the rainforest in general. Stopping, say, logging or illegal logging as it was in this case. Basically, we live at a moment where there's about half the rainforest remaining. Although it's been something we've been hearing about for a generation, ever since I was a child it's always about saving the rainforest. This many football fields have been cut and the rest. Now it seems like we have perhaps more urgent things on our mind like climate change. But what I didn't realize at the time was that deforestation actually makes up almost a fifth of the CO2 that's releasing to the atmosphere. Almost a fifth of all the CO2 that ends up in the atmosphere actually comes from deforestation, which is more than all transportation, all of the planes, trains, cars, ships, trucks, combined, and don't add up to the overall effect of deforestation. And when I say that half the forest remains, every year actually 200,000 square kilometers of forest are cut, but even that doesn't tell the full story. Only now in the past year they're starting to realize that on the periphery of the forest that places the borders between forest and no forest, which actually makes up 70% of all the forest that remains. The carbon stocks that exist in those peripheral areas is actually lower than the rest of the forest. So the actual carbon impact might be even higher than we expect. Likewise, on these border areas there's an extreme decline in biodiversity. It's very difficult for species to live on the edge of the forest versus large contiguous spots, which is one of the reasons amongst others that deforestation is causing the highest extinction rate that we've seen in 65 million years. It's much, much higher than anything on record. What's not actually usually realized is that up to 90% of the activities in these rainforest nations in the forest actually is illegal logging. So up to 90% of all the logging that takes place in the rainforest is illegal. And almost 18% of the climate change that we're seeing or the carbon that's released in the atmosphere comes from deforestation. It's 90% of the logging that takes place is illegal. And if we can actually cut into illegal logging, it could have a really, really profound immediate impact on climate change, perhaps more than any other sort of government-based action that you could take on. And it might be the simplest and cheapest and fastest way to actually fight climate change based on a mandate that already exists. There's many technologies out there that are being used for this. You probably have seen the Earth time lapse outside. The most popular one is probably satellite imagery. Satellite imagery has completely changed our understanding of deforestation. Never before have we really been able to see how really immense and sometimes horrific the deforestation is. It's allowed us to look into places that were previously hidden to us, including countries that don't share that data. So this is an extremely popular way of doing it. But satellite imagery is usually days, weeks, months, sometimes years old. And you're only, in some cases, able to see large areas that were cut. So it's not really something that would work in a situation, say, in the given reserve for being able to actually know where trees are being cut and actually show up to stop it. Other ways are drones, but these are pretty high tech, pretty expensive. Camera traps are a really popular solution, but they kind of just can see what's right in front of you and people have to go get them. Obviously, expensive and difficult. And in many cases, just community reporting is an extremely popular way of fighting it. These are all ways that technology has been helping to fight against deforestation, but none of those actually would have helped or have been relevant in the situation in the given reserve that you saw. So I sort of thought of a different way that we want to take this on. So here's the idea, right? The moment that a chainsaw is used in the forest, a device that we have in the tree picks up the sound of the chainsaw, sends an alert through the cloud API to local rangers who get an alert who can choose to jump on their motorcycles and actually show up in real time and stop the loggers in this highly realistic visualization. But yeah, the basic idea is that you can have a real-time system that uses sort of infrastructure that they're already to actually show up and stop the loggers. But that's a pretty high tech system. It sort of revolves around the technology that you might not or sort of infrastructure that you might not have. It's easy to imagine doing that here in Davos or in a city like San Francisco where I'm from, you always want to imagine these really high tech solutions. But in the rainforest, that's not usually very possible. So the whole idea is used what's already there. What's in the rainforest? Well, as we saw, there are people. So this place, this given sanctuary, had people that would show up to stop it. It wasn't an issue of corruption. They actually were quite sincere. They just didn't know where it was. And the amazing thing is that there's actually pretty good connectivity as well. Everyone's on their cell phones in a lot of places. If you visit these really remote places, people are on their phones, on Facebook, they're surfing the web, they're texting each other. There is connectivity even in very remote places. And of course, this is an issue that will only become easier with time. But that's not enough, right? We need something that we can actually use. Phones are actually a pretty great tool. You have to have some sort of device that's up in the tree to listen to it. Phones are fantastic for this. It's a really, really popular platform. We can use phones to write software for it. You guys probably all have smartphones here in the audience. Phones are great for running apps. And chances are, you can imagine that they can do all sorts of great stuff. You have to protect the phone. You put the phone in a box and you have to keep it powered, which is why we have these solar panels. This is kind of one of the harder engineering challenges was to make a device that can work under a tree canopy. There's a very powerful microphone that can listen to the sound of the forest and potentially pick out chainstalls in this case. The whole idea is use what's already there, try and get it put it all together as you can. And then up in a tree looks kind of like this. It's really just a phone in a box that sits up there in a tree and does the job of what people otherwise would have to walk through the forest to do. And then in the end, if you can use these sort of pieces, what you can have is a system that operates like that sort of animation that you had where a logger makes a noise, the device picks it up through our cloud API, alerts the authorities, and they can't show up in real time and stop it. So before we had people, big connectivity, and the third thing that we're able to add is trash. That's how we're able to build it. Cell phones, they may be expensive when you buy them the first time, but several months later, a year later, they're basically worthless. In the United States, every year alone, we throw away hundreds of millions of smartphones, and of course it's probably in the billions worldwide. There are so many of these things lying around that you don't know what to do with them, and yet they can all run software that everyone in the world knows how to develop for, everyone in the world knows how to use, and they're made to last. So we took the technology that you saw, and we took it back to Indonesia to test it to a different given reserve where they were having a problem with illegal logging. He's really cute there. But they were having a problem with illegal logging similar to the other place on the periphery. We put it up in trees, and on the second day, we picked up the sounds of chainsaws on the periphery, and with the rangers, we were able to head off towards the alert. This is the second day I really wasn't sure how the system was going to work. That guy kind of went ahead of me. He's much more brave than I am, but I have to follow him because we sort of went out, and we got over the top of the hill and actually caught some loggers in the act. This is the second day we ever tested the system built out of old cell phones, trash in a new place in the rainforest. So for me, this is really exciting. I thought it might work. It's important to point out, the way we do this is not people listening. The phones are actually not passing these things on to people. As with any technology put out there, you want it to be able to operate independently. All the technologies you saw before, satellites, camera traps, people on the app, planes, things like that, they all operate on a similar principle of the types of data that people themselves are interested in. We have a tendency to build technology as if for consumers. What's particularly interesting about this, I think, is that we decided to take a different route. Although the journal is very noisy, it's difficult for people to pick out the sounds of chainsaws. It's actually pretty easy for computers to do that, and you can sort of see this. This is pretty close. This is really not cutting-edge analysis. The whole idea is that whenever a chainsaw goes off, these peaks sort of show up. It's pretty easy for a computer to pick those out programmatically, and a computer, they can actually do this on their own. And so by focusing on something computers do well instead of people, we were able to build a system cheaply using sort of existing not difficult technology at all to be able to pick out the sounds of chainsaws and send an alert to show up and stop it. Based on that, the chainsaw that we detected in that area was almost a full kilometer away from where we were. This is pretty exciting because it means that one device put up in a tree, something made from trash, can actually pick up a chainsaw to a kilometer away, which gives it a kilometer radius. If you were to put them around the sort of periphery of a reserve, you could protect the inside area, the outside. Basically, someone would have to walk two kilometers in to be able to cut a tree and get it out of there. So this is sort of exciting in terms of that. But there's actually, based on that, we say that deforestation is one of the biggest contributors to climate change. But how does that actually pan out? Well, one device, if it's covering a full kilometer radius, that means that it can literally protect three square kilometers, which is equivalent to 15,000 tons of CO2 that would not be released into the atmosphere. Because when you cut down three kilometers of forest, it releases this much CO2 into the atmosphere. And what's amazing here is that 15,000 tons of CO2 is equivalent to 3,000 cars on the road for a year. Which means that an old device up in a endangered forest, an old phone sitting in a tree with some panels, is able to do the equivalent of taking 3,000 cars off the road. And since we made it from trash, you know, it's actually pretty cheap. But that's not even the best way to do it, right? This was all about what you can literally protect. We got some news from our partners in Africa that suggested that they had a better way of doing it. Their whole suggestion was that, look, you've been listening for chainsaws, but we have an area here, I'm going to back up a little bit. We have an area in Africa. It's about 2,500 square kilometers. But the only way in and out is through this one access road. So this is about 2,500 square kilometers of forest. There's gorillas. There's elephants. And there's chimpanzees. And there's a lot of illegal logging taking place here, but it all goes in and out on this one road. So if we were to take the system that detects chainsaws, change it to work for detecting vehicles, like motorcycles, trucks, things like that, which operates under a similar principle. It's still just a motor. Then in fact, you could protect this entire area with just a handful of phones up in trees around this one entry and exit point. What that actually looks like is a gate. There's one gate. And there's these guards at the gate who are responsible for making sure that all the traffic in and out is legit. And of course, there are all these endangered species that are inside there. They're supposed to stop it. The assumption was that these guys are being paid to let the poachers and the loggers through the gate. What we found is that that was actually not the case. They only work during the daytime, as people do, but our devices work 24-7. What we found by changing it to listen for motorcycles is that all the traffic in and out on the road was being done between the hours of 4 and 5 a.m. And they'd also cut a side road on the other side of the gate to allow them to get the motorcycles out around the guard gate. So it indicated these guards to a certain degree. But we also showed that technology can have a real edge when it comes to guarding these areas because these people only work during the daytime, but the poachers, therefore, can choose the best time to get in and out and easily avoid that. But they can't actually fool a machine that's listening the entire time. So that was the next sort of way in which we adapted the system. Next, we thought we'd take it to Brazil. So Brazil is a really interesting sort of place. I'm actually taking you through this sort of step-by-step, these case studies that allow you to sort of see the ways in which we use the technology. But Brazil is really a really interesting place, just from satellite imagery. You see this ocean of deforestation. All of this used to be forest, obviously. But this entire area has been cut. But you have these islands of pretty intact forest on the outskirts. And it's not necessarily clear just from there what's actually happening there. Those are not actually reserves in the typical sense. They're not nature reserves, but they're indigenous tribal areas, at least many of them are. These are not areas that are reserved for keeping the forest intact. But just by nature of their customs and their culture, indigenous people do tend to keep the forest intact. So this could be a really great way to preserve forest is simply by helping indigenous people protect their lands. Let's actually zoom in on one here. So we took our system to Brazil to work with a tribe called Itembe. This is actually two indigenous areas. You'll notice that one of them is pretty solidly intact. This tribe here, they do have some illegal logging issues. When illegal loggers come onto their lands, they take their clothes off and drag them behind trucks to get them out. As a result, this place tends to be pretty well protected. People don't tend to go in there and cut too many trees. But Itembe are a different tribe. This is the Itembe land. The Itembe have not historically been so aggressive. And as a result, what you can see is there's a tremendous amount of deforestation that's happened here. This is their legally recognized territory. All of the villages are up in here in the north and down here in the south. These are the Itembe. There's about 1,500 of them left, not that many. And they sort of feel that they're on their last stand. Because as I said, the villages are in the north and the south. This entire middle area here, this entire purple area, is not actually under their control. This entire area is controlled by illegal loggers, poachers, and drug plantations. Meaning that the entire population of Itembe is divided across these two areas. There's no way for them to actually get up to see each other and work together, because it's not just this area. These areas on the outskirts are their enemies as well. But they do realize this is their last stand. They have to both protect their land. Their identity is tied to the land. And fortunately for that, this is also the Itembe. The Itembe are pretty well organized. They're pretty well armed. And they've recently decided to band together across the two areas, the two regions, and drive out the illegal plantations and logging that's taking place there. We take their land, replant the forest, and improve the conditions there. This is particularly difficult, because it's just so rampant what's happening inside there. So that area that's in purple, if you just drive through it and you're a bit unlucky, what you will do is run into brand new trucks, industrial scale, illegal logging that's taking place there. These are people that are sort of not supposed to be on the land. This is Itembe land. Itembe get stuck in a situation where they sort of have to speed past these trucks. And so in our case, it's not just necessarily about knowing when the trucks come on the land and off the land about establishing this perimeter. It's really about safety as well. If there's only 30 Itembe rangers out of 1500 of them and they're actually responsible for retaking this land from hundreds of illegal loggers, it's useful for them to know where the trucks are so they can band together and actually go and stop it. And so really these types of situations were very common for them and very dangerous and scary. So we know we use cell phone service. How's that looking in Brazil? Pretty good actually. This is an area that's surrounded by cell towers. It actually looks a little bit better than it is. They're 40 kilometers away, so this is a pretty big area. And so while it's reasonable to think that we could get cell phone service in this area, cell phone service that would allow us to operate our system and send alerts to the Itembe, in fact 40 kilometers is pretty far. Normally the way that you would solve that and the way they solve that in rural communities is to build these big metal towers. But that's dangerous and expensive and not really all that feasible. So sticking with the idea of using what's already there, what do we have? We have people. We have cell phone access points, but they're far away. We don't have towers. But we do have a lot of trees. And the trees are pretty tall. So it comes down to the fact that instead of building towers, you can use what's already out there. You have everything you need. You can climb extremely high in trees and start setting up our devices along with some antennas. So this is me figuring out how to get really high up in trees. It took a while to figure that out. This is not something that Itembe usually do, but it's something I'm now trained in so that they can go and set up their own devices in the forest. And it's pretty great that although there is no cell phone service, we do have these 200, 300 foot tall trees. That's not what it led to. Just sitting up here in the tree while it rains away. Down there. About 120 feet up. But pretty amazing thing is that if you look at the signal up there. Well, that was not pretty good. Oh, sorry. Put the signal up there. We got cell phone service. This huge perabellic antenna that we got which is picking up a signal from about 30 kilometers away here in Brazil in the Itembe territory. So 30 kilometers is pretty far. It's beyond what you'd expect to be able to make a phone call, everything else. And if we're actually able to pick up a signal from 30 kilometers away, and 70% of the rainforest that's under threat is actually less than one kilometer from the edge, simply by extending the range that our system can work, we could protect these most endangered areas. So basically in the end of the day, we have this area here based on the experiment working about 50 kilometers as well. So it's quite feasible that we could actually protect this entire area with the Itembe, establish a perimeter and allow them to incrementally take it back. In fact, since we first set up there, they've been going out on patrols and setting up our system. They retake some land, set up our system, we take some land, set up our system. And as a result of that, they've been able to protect their territory from the sort of pushback that they get. And so while I said before that this was the limit of their territory over the past three months, they've actually retaken up to here and they've been resettling families in this area, which is actually really great news. So you see me climbing trees. You see me out there doing, you know, chasing down loggers. That's not really what it is like most of the time. It's actually pretty geeky stuff out in the field. And this is actually the way it should be. Most of what we're doing is trying to build technology that allows other people out there, like Itembe, to do the much harder work. And this is actually important because that's actually what makes it scalable. It's not really feasible to have people like me or our company actually out in the field doing this. What we really want is The Itembe to take the responsibility for it and for us to be able to write the software from afar, to build the hardware from afar, have them install it on their own phones and run it in the trees. So The Itembe have already retaken large parts of their land. We've been sort of helping the small parts of that. And it really does make sense to look at the map of the Amazon and say, okay, all these areas here are indigenous reserves. This is the area where we had a little bit of cell phone service. And this is the frontier of the Amazon. All these areas that have the most cell phone service are the places that are most cut, the most under threat. Cell phone service tends to show up where people tend to settle. And if we're going to protect this entire frontier of the Amazon, it looks like a lot of the resources that we need are already there. So this is actually pretty good news for the forest, I think. And especially as it relates to the indigenous people who might be the best protectors of the forest in Brazil. So that's how we might actually have an effect on protecting the Amazon. In terms of larger themes, I think it really comes down to what does it take for technology or people actually to protect the forest? Capability is super important. People are not capable of knowing what's happening in a forest just with their own resources. By walking through the forest, it's not going to work out. And you'd have a technological edge that tells them where the issues are, something that allows them to pick up the sounds of chainsaws or pick up the evidence of these other activities and be able to go show up and stop it. Transparency is incredibly important. You want to make sure the data is available for anyone around the world to pay attention to. And in a sense, the only reason there's illegal logging in the first place in these areas is because of a lack of transparency. It's very easy to get away with it in areas where you have no risk of being caught. By introducing a little bit of technology and having the right partners on the ground, you can make it much more difficult and raise the stakes for the illegal loggers. And so these are the two ideas that I think are very important when it comes to actually taking some local idea and making it work on a larger scale. The last one that's most important, I think, is relevance. I think saving the rainforest is one of these really boring subjects for people these days. We grew up hearing about it. I've known about it since I was a small child. We all sort of agree it's very important, but it's not very relevant in a sense to our daily lives. It's the type of thing you hear about football fields being destroyed. You hear about areas that have been cut last month, last week, last year. You may hear that it relates to climate change, but it's all very abstract and very sort of non-experiential. And so I really think that what makes it possible for us to, as the Prime Minister said, start building a system of sort of an impact economy or a social innovation type of situation where you can actually build a business around saving the rainforest that matters for the people there, is the fact that everyone here cares about it, but through this real-time data we are able to create relevance. And we've been able to show that as well. So we release an app from our devices that are out there in the field that are streaming the sounds of the forest in real-time, make it possible for people in the U.S. and elsewhere to listen to the live sounds of the forest. There's been a great deal of interest around this simply because it sounds pretty cool out there in the forest. This is a resource that the forest has to offer, and there's already existing interest from people in the West to actually pay attention to it. So if we can sort of leverage away, take the interest from the West, the sort of interest in what's happening in the forest and interest in saving it, and make it experiential and real-time and interesting for people, then I think that there's an option we could have to save the rainforest and create value from that for the people there on the ground. And so back to the whole idea. I really think we live at a pretty amazing time. There's so many people out there that would want to save it. They're actually quite technologically adept. They have phones. They have connectivity. We keep hearing from more and more people that there's increasing connectivity. Here at Davos, I'm talking to people who are saying, yes, we can wire the entire Amazon in under two years. I believe that, and I think it's bound to happen. These two things are not going to be much of a problem. And at the same time, based on this huge wave of the Third Industrial Revolution, we have so much technological detritus, so much technological waste that's still incredibly useful. We have really manufactured our way into really a gold mine of potential sensors in the form of old phones. So putting these three things together, which we have in abundance right now, and we'll have more of in the near future, I really do think that it is possible for us to protect and save large amounts of forest.