 All right, well, hello everyone. Good afternoon, good morning, good evening, depending on where you're joining us from today. And welcome to Engineering for Change or E4C for Short. We're pleased to bring you today our E4C seminar series for 2021. The seminar series aims to intellectually develop the field of engineering for global development. We host a new research institution monthly and bi-monthly to learn about their work in advancing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and sustainability at large. Today's seminar will be presented by an incredible roster of speakers, including Dr. Inna Neveles Torres, Dr. Diana Venegas and Luis Fernandez, as well as our intrepid moderator and founder, Dr. Jesse Austin Brenerman. My name is Yana Aranda, and I am the director of the Engineering Global Development Group at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and also serve as the president of Engineering for Change. The seminar you're participating in today is delivered in collaboration with ConservationX Labs and the Artisanal Mining Grand Challenge, which you'll hear more about shortly. We are honored to be joined by our incredible speakers who are addressing the critical issue of mercury pollution from artisanal gold mining. I wanna welcome you all again. The seminar recording will be archived on E4C's site as well as on our YouTube channel, and both of those URLs are listed on the slide that you are seeing now. Information on upcoming seminars is available on the E4C site, and for those of you who are members of Engineering for Change, you will receive invitations to upcoming seminars directly. If you have questions, comments, and recommendations for future topics and speakers, we encourage you to contact the E4C seminar team and also our webinars producer webinars at engineeringforchange.org. We also invite you to share your feedback at the end of the seminar to inform our strategy. You'll be receiving a link to that survey directly. And if you're following us on Twitter today, I encourage you to join the conversation with our dedicated hashtag, hashtag E4C seminars. Seminar series, apologies. Now, as I mentioned, the series was launched by Dr. Jesse Ostendrederman, who leads ASME's Engineering Global Development Research Committee. Jesse is a system professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan. He earned his PhD in mechanical engineering from MIT and also holds an SM in mechanical engineering and BS in ocean engineering from MIT. Prior to his academic career, he worked as a development engineer in Peru, working with rural communities on alternative business opportunities and with local doctors groups on medical device development. He also cut his teeth as a teacher, a math teacher in Boston. So he is multifaceted as they come. So he's currently the director of the Global Design Laboratory at University of Michigan, focusing on developing design processes and support tools to help multidisciplinary design teams think at a systems level when performing complex systems design tasks. Now, before we move on to our presenters, I'd like to tell you a bit about engineering for change. E4C is an older organization, digital platform and global community of more than one million engineers, technologists, designers, development practitioners and social scientists who are leveraging technology to solve quality of life challenges faced by underserved communities. Some of those challenges may include access to clean water and sanitation, sustainable energy, improved agriculture and more. We invite you to become a member. E4C membership is free and provides access to news and thought leaders. We'll prior our database of more than 1,000 essential technologies in our solutions library, professional development resources and current opportunities such as jobs, funding calls, fellowships and more. E4C members also receive exclusive invitations to online regional events, such as the one we are having today and access to resources online to their interests. We invite you to visit our website to learn more and sign up. E4C's research work cuts across geographies and sectors to deliver an ecosystem view of technology for good. Original research is conducted annually by engineering for change research fellows on behalf of our partners and sponsors and delivered as digestible reports with implementable insights. We invite you to visit our research page. The URL is listed on the slide to explore our field insights, research collaborations and review of the state of engineering for global development which is a compilation of academic programs and institutions offering training in this emerging sector. If you have a research question or want to work with us on a research project as a fellow, please contact us at research at engineeringforchange.org. Now, as I mentioned at the top of this webinar, we are hosting this in collaboration with conservation labs and the Artisanal Mining Grand Challenge. For those of you who are unfamiliar, this is a challenge that is happening right now focusing on accelerating solutions for people and the planet. There are over a million dollars in prizes for winners and solutions are being actively sought out around the world. The challenge is focused specifically on the Amazon and this is a global call for innovators, researchers and entrepreneurs from all over the world to develop and implement solutions that address the environmental and social costs of artisanal and small scale gold mining in the Amazon. In particular, we are seeking applicants from, and I also have this in Spanish, the Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Guyana, and Suriname. So the closing date is November 10th. So please visit the URL listed on this slide to register to get more information and learn more about how to apply for this really important challenge. And you'll hear why this is so important through the context of our speakers today. Now, we're so thrilled to welcome everyone today and learn a little bit more about where you are. I know you're all experts in Zoom since the pandemic has forced all of us to meet here but we're going to take a moment to meet you and practice a little bit on the platform. So please use the chat window, which is located to the bottom right of your screen to type in the location from which you're joining us today. I'll start. I am joining you all from Brooklyn, New York today. If the chat is not open on your screen, try clicking the chat icon at the bottom of the screen in the middle of the slide. So welcome from South Carolina to Chicago, Washington DC to Malawi, Omaha, Nebraska to New Jersey, Isikito, Columbia, Princeton. Welcome, everyone. We're so thrilled to have you with us from Arlington to Bogota, South Carolina. Lots of South Carolina joining us today. LA and Chia, Columbia, brilliant. So thrilled to have you. Do keep adding your locations there. Please note that we would like for you to maintain your questions. You put them into the Q&A window versus the chat. Those will be collated for our speakers to ensure we don't miss anything. If you have any technical questions or need to address some key points, just send a private chat to the engineer for change admin. All right. I think those are all the instructions and again, welcome everyone. With that, I am so thrilled to now introduce our incredible speakers, starting with Dr. Irene Vélez Torres, who is a full professor at the University of Valle. She obtained her PhD in human political geography from the University of Copenhagen after having studied philosophy and cultural studies at the University, Universidad Nacional de Colombia. She has been a visiting scholar at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague and at the Loughborough University in the UK. Her region of interest in Latin America and its local connections, Colombia in particular, where she works on the critical analysis of rural conflicts, social and environmental equity, and issues of racial and ethnic inequality. She considers participatory and interdisciplinary methodologies of crucial importance in order to create knowledge that is valuable for the communities as well as for academia. And we couldn't agree more on that particular point. She is joined today by Dr. Diana Venegas, who earned her PhD in master's in agricultural and biological engineering at the University of Florida. Prior to that, she received a degree in food engineering from the Universidad de Valle in Colombia. While her research is mostly focused on biosensors development, she has many other areas of expertise, including electrochemical detection, electrochemical analysis, volatometry, cyclic volatometry, electro analytical chemistry, self-assembled monolayers. I'm not going to go through all of these there, many very diverse technical expertise. She joined constant in 2019. Dr. Venegas is interested in engineering solutions to technological challenges related to food and agriculture and settings of low resource and marginalization. She's also focused on integration and adapting technologies to support sustainable food systems and her programs spans the United States, Colombia and China. Again, really incredible expertise here. And last but not least, they'll be joined by Luis Fernandez, who is the executive director of Wake Forest University Center for Amazonian Scientific Innovation, a research initiative that examines the impacts of artisanal gold mining, mercury contamination and deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon. Luis is also a research associate professor in the Department of Biology and a fellow at Wake Forest University Center for Energy, Environment and Sustainability. He's trained as a tropical ecologist. He's an expert on the environmental impacts of artisanal scale mining and mining related environmental mercury contamination. He has held professional positions at Stanford University, Carnegie Institution for Science, the US EPA, Argonne National Laboratory in the University of Michigan and has led major research efforts in Brazil, Colombia, Peru and Madagascar. So wow, I'm going to stop sharing my screen. Bienvenido, over to you, Liana. Or Irana, I'm not sure who's starting. Yeah, I didn't assign, but we're going to share the screen. Well, thank you very much for this invitation. It is a real pleasure to be sharing with you some of the results that we have reached throughout our transdisciplinary research project that we have developed over the last five years. Artisanal gold mining in Colombia is not very different from all the contexts in the Global South. Particularly, it shares a lot of similarities with Peru and Brazil in Latin America, but also with Ghana or Congo in Africa. What could be similar is, for example, the lack of formality, but also the use of some very dangerous pollutants such as mercury and cyanide. 23% of the municipalities in Colombia have some sort of artisanal gold mining. And because of the lack of formalization in 2019, the national government attempt to formalize the sector, however, only reaching 2% of artisanal gold mining formalization, which is very low and challenges extremely the possibilities to trace the consequences and social impacts of artisanal gold mining. Artisanal gold mining is the activity that releases the most mercury to the atmosphere. At a global scale, more or less, 38% of the total emissions come from artisanal gold mining. And Colombia is the third biggest mercury releaser, but also the first one if we count the per capita pollution that we generate. In the last two decades, Colombia has had an import rate of mercury that goes more or less between 130 and 133 tons of mercury legally imported. However, some of the scholars think that the real rates of mercury that is circulating in the Colombian environment can be close to 200 tons per year. This number has, however, dropped in the last two years, but it is very polemic, the reason why the number is now so low as two tons per year. Traditional gold mining, it's a mercury-free activity that is different from artisanal gold mining. In Colombia, traditional gold mining is mostly adorned by ethnic communities who have for over centuries extracted gold using very rudimentary and clean technologies. But in the last one or two decades, the use of mercury has increased and therefore the traditional mining has been pushed away from social and ecological relationships. We are in this context looking at one particular territory, La Toma, located at the southwest of Colombia. La Toma is a mining community. It's a rural area located in a very conflictive zone of Colombia. The community has more or less 7,000 inhabitants that occupy more or less seven square kilometers. 92% of this community self-identifies after descendants, which in Colombia is very relevant because since the constitution of 1991, ethnic communities have special rights. And one of the rights or some of them refer to the control that the communities can have over the resources and the governance in their territories. 52% of this community says that their main economic activity is traditional gold mining. So it has a very important social and cultural relevance for the community. Five years ago, this community saw something happening in the Ovejas River, which is the one that you see in this picture, which was a lot of fish being dead in the river. This is a traditionally fishing community. So they were devastated, but also very worried. And they called the university to try to make sense of what was going on there. And since then, we are pursuing this research objective of understanding what is the status, what is the level of contamination that the territory has and how it can be impacting a human health. But we don't only want to assess the level of contamination, but also to build knowledge that can be useful for the community and that can help them to make sense of what is going on over there, but to make changes, local changes that improve the environmental governance in the territory. So we are doing this project with a transdisciplinary approach that basically combines qualitative social research methods with quantitative engineering methods. And the most relevant of this strategy is the participation of the community, not only as informants, but as really participants and people that can make changes. That's our point of departure. So this is one of the examples of how the communities participate in the project. We, from the social science, we propose a method, which is social cryptography. So with that method, what we want to do is to understand what could be the connections between the water sources that the community uses for water consumption, for local water consumption, and what could be the places where the mercury is being released. So we do this cryptography and with the community, we prioritize what could be the places that are more vulnerable or that can generate more impact to the community. For example, we, through the knowledge of the community, we could understand that the school, the local school, was an important place to research because even though we couldn't see a mine close by, it is a place where at least 200 children are consuming water in an everyday basis. So from that information, we prioritize some sampling sites and this is where the engineers come to help us in pursuing the research. Okay, so I'm not going to expand too much on the faith and transport of mercury in the context of artisanal mining, but what I want to point out is that mercury is involving several steps of the process of artisanal mining in Latoma. And this is challenging. My part of the project is, my little piece is just the monitoring of the pollutant in water, right? And there's several sources, putative sources of mercury contamination in the water that the community uses. Now, again, this is a rural community that doesn't have access to aqueduct or any kind of clean water infrastructure and sanitation infrastructure. So whatever is in the water is going to impact them directly because they consume it as such. Now, mercury is a very tricky pollutant because it can speculate depending on the environmental conditions. So what I will say is that in the water, we can have both ionic mercury and methylmercury, which is the most dangerous form of mercury. So from that, we find different environmental engineering needs and the challenges associated with monitoring the pollutant were like one of the reasons why it was so important that we teamed up with the community and made them participants of the research, not just subjects of research or recipients of knowledge, but they really needed to help us. One of the reasons is this is a conflict zone. So in the context of the armed conflict in Colombia, it's not very safe to just go to a rural place and start collecting samples. So this is one of the ways in which we collaborated with them. They really let us know what days were safe to go to the territory. And then because the pandemic started as we were like in the middle of this process, we ended up training community members to be able to do the sampling themselves in the territory and then they cheap the samples to the university in the city of Cali. Now, in terms of in situ monitoring, there's a lot of complexity and limitations. For example, there's not electric grid, access communication and transportation is also very difficult. There's no cell phone towers, all of that. So it's really hard to bring technology there to do work. Then the last thing that I want to mention is laboratory analysis are very expensive for mercury. For example, we usually use atomic absorption spectroscopy as the standard technique for assessing mercury levels. We don't have that easily accessible in the region. So the cost of this monitoring is a real factor and this is one of the needs that we're trying to tackle now I'm going to show a little bit about how we're doing that. But I'm just going to jump real quick to some water pollution results that we collected last year. So on the left side, we have just the mercury concentration levels and 10 different sampling points which were decided using the methodology that Irene described. So what I want you to see here is just if you look at the red dots, those are the average concentration for each site and each site was sampled in three different dates. And so the red dotted line is just the threshold that is established by the World Health Organization for drinking water. Now this is really environmental water. This is not the standard drinking water that we engineers can think of that has been treated in a water treatment facility. This is just environmental water, but again, because this community does not have access to that infrastructure, they consume the water directly and use it. So it's kind of tricky to use these levels in this way. But then the next, the solid red line indicates the threshold established by the EPA here in the United States and also Colombian regulations use the same thresholds as the EPA. So what I will say here is that some of the points around, this is what the graph next to it is trying to show, some of the points like half of them were above the average of all points, but most of them were like below the regulatory threshold. However, one consideration to have which we later analyze this using risk assessment with our partners at the University of Florida is that it's kind of tricky because the community doesn't leave the place, they are basically chronically exposed to low levels of mercury and have been forever about two decades now. So the impacts can be really significant if you consider that time of exposure. And then in this particular site, this little village is located on the hillside. So we found an interesting correlation between the sampling date and the mercury levels in water for consumption. This is, we think is associated with actually weather because in the first time we went sampling, there was a lot of rain. So we think that runoff was a factor, the runoff of mercury from the soil and from the places where they stored the ores that have been already treated with mercury and cyanide. Then the second time we went, there was also some rain, but not as much. And then the third time it was completely dry season. So, and this is on the hillside, which makes sense. It means probably that upstream, there's mercury pollution sources. This is another location in the same region, but this community is on top of the mountain. So here we don't see that correlation with the date of the sampling. However, what I will point out is that there were more sampling sites in that location that were above the threshold established by the World Health Organization. And also I will say that that makes sense because, and the average of concentration of mercury in all sampling sites was higher than in the first area that we visited. That makes sense because this area here is where the mercury is used the most in the burning process to separate the gold from the mercury, the amalgam. So we then explain these results. We try to do it as quickly as we can to the community. So not just to ourselves, but we need to be ready to tell the community what's going on. And this is one of the cartoons that we made to explain after we ran the data through the risk assessment models. We explained to them, okay, so if we look at age groups really, like there's a high risk of impact on babies. And this is just associated probably with the body size. And then infants, about 25% of the infants will be affected, children in school age. And then the least affected will be the adults. And that makes sense because some of the adults, particularly the minors, the male minors that work with mercury were kind of hesitant in, you know, with this explanation of the problematic of using mercury. However, the women felt very validated because in their community, they're the ones in charge of taking care of small children and the elderly, which are the people that are experiencing already health problems that they didn't see before the introduction of mercury. In terms of development of technology, we're now in the lab working on the development of low cost sensors, electrochemical and optical sensors using materials that can be found, like purchase easily in Colombia. So our idea is to be able to bring and help the technology be appropriated and fully developed in Colombia and be used with the university and association with the communities. So I'm not going to expand too much on how the sensors work for the same sake of time, but if anyone has questions, please feel free to put them in the chat or maybe we can talk about them later. Again, like I said, it's very important for us to deliver what we learn to both the scientific community but also give it back to the community that is affected the most. So that requires some translation from all of the academic lingo into something that people can understand better. So I'm not going to expand on the papers that we publish on this because, yeah, what I will say is we do it, we also present in conferences, but I'm going to pass it on to Irene because I think this is very important, interesting for how to also bring this knowledge back to the community. Well, so as it was the interest of the community what motivated us in the first place to go and try to make sense of this contamination in Latoma, it is also our commitment to go back to them and to try to reinforce what could be solutions and how can we learn from these five years of research. So we are doing this through several communication and pedagogical strategies. One thing that we have been doing for the last year is to develop virtual learning materials. It actually, we created the project before COVID times but when COVID was there that it was just the perfect strategy to think of. This community, as Diana said, is disconnected from electricity and from internet. So we are developing materials that can be used in computers without any connectivity. And the idea is that in secondary the teachers can delivery these materials to the students and the students can explore it and learn at the same time content that they will usually learn in a normal chemistry class or biology class but that they do it in relation to the problem of mercury contamination. We are also producing podcasts but we are trying to go against the usual top-down methodology. So what we are doing is to make a radio, radio programs with the community members to try to make sense with them and in their own language of what's going on in the territory. And we are organizing that material in order to reproduce it and distribute it in more than 40 local radio stations from the region. We have also produced some videos to introduce what are the objectives of the project. And now we are working on our final video to also disseminate some of the most important results and we have a website that you are very welcome to visit and social media. This project hasn't finished. We hope to continue doing things at this moment in particular, we are finalizing the health assessment in Latoma and Jolombo. We are gonna be analyzing these results in relation to the water quality analysis and some fish sampling that we have also done last year. The 3rd of September and 10th of September, we are organizing two dissemination seminars. So you are very welcome to participate. It's gonna be in Spanish, but gonna have English simultaneous translation. So if you are interested, please write down your email and we will contact you for that participation. And we are gonna disseminate results again by the end of this year to local communities and local governmental organizations if interested because that has been one of the biggest challenges in this research, which is basically like the difficulty to engage with authorities. And that's it. Thank you very much. And we are here, happy to hear your questions. So I believe now we're going to transition to Luis. Thank you so much, Niana, Irene. Great. Well, thank you very much and congratulations to the team and my colleagues in Columbia, really important work. So I'm gonna start my presentation now and just give you a second here. Just wanna confirm that things are looking good. Looking great. Okay, great. Thank you. Okay. So my name is Luis Fernandez and I am a research professor at Wake Forest University and also the executive director of the Center for Amazonian Scientific Innovation. And I'll be talking about, well, let me tell you about what the goal for my talk with you today is. One is to give you an overview of the issue of artisanal gold mining in the Amazon, how that connects gold with the destruction of rainforest and mercury contamination of entire ecosystems in not just the Amazon, but many tropical areas around the world, how that's connected to gold, which is something that I think we all consume not only in jewelry, but also in our cell phones, in the production of electronics, switches and part of our lives. But also the role of how innovation can help understand the weight of that demand and how well you could be part of the solution for many of the problems that exist through individual action, but also as being part of initiatives such as many of the work to create challenges and prizes to generate interest and action for developing real solutions that could be applicable in over 80 countries around the world. So let me start my presentation and this is meant to, I think, intrigue you. Hopefully you'll find this interesting. And I'll also be discussing about the work that that SINSEA is doing, which is this research center that we've created in Peru in partnership with Wake Forest University and USAID, the US Agency for International Development for addressing much of these issues to generate solutions. So what we're looking at here is a piece of gold and this is what gold looks like when it's artisanally mined. And much of the question is like, how much does that gold cost? And I don't mean in economic terms, but what is the cost of forests? What is the cost of watersheds? What is the cost of biodiversity? And how this activity transforms pristine rainforest areas like you see here to landscapes that are highly transformed. This was a small creek that was maybe about 25 kilometers long and now essentially it looks like a forest. And we're gonna examine what this is and what this image represents in places like the Amazon. So ASGM is the acronym for artisanal small-scale gold mining. And there's mainly, there's two things that you should take away from the slide. One is that there's four general regions that it's typically seen in Latin America, Colombia, where my colleagues just presented the Guiana Shield. This is the central Amazon and this is the Andes Amazon region where I work. And it is the fastest growing hotspot and currently the largest hotspot in Amazonia for ASGM. The place that we... I'm not sure if we're seeing Louise caused. I think we've lost Louise. Louise, can you hear us? If we have Louise drop off or return, Madeline, if you can just check in with him, we can consider taking a targeted question for Diana or Irene while we wait for his return. Sure, so Diana and Irene, thanks first of all for the amazing information and presentation, just amazing transdisciplinary. I think it was really important sort of the breadth of the approaches you're bringing to the one problem. One of the things that I thought was interesting and we have a question here about it. So in my previous work and we're looking at sort of these public health impacts of different technology interventions, we have to look at different pathways that this pollution happens. So you just heard Louise talking about forest, biodiversity, all these different things. Even if we're just looking at the health impacts that you guys were studying, how did you talk to the community or look into what are all the different ways, the potential ways in which mercury could be affecting the population or you talked about the risk models? But you're doing a lot of water sampling and someone brought up soil, but there's other ways in which pollutants and not only mercury can get into the population and cause health problems. So how did you guys approach that and discuss with the community about, hey, your expectations might be that it's water or that it's soil or something else. And this is why we're focusing on that. So sort of just talk about the different pathways that you guys have. Okay, I'm gonna respond real quick because I see Louise is back, but is to clarify, so there's several considerations. Well, one is that the community is concerned which is what triggered the project was the water because they were, one of the complementary livelihoods is fishing and they sold this dead fish. So they really wanted to know what was happening in the water. Now, coincidentally, like you mentioned, there's a lot of potential routes of exposure to mercury and you can have exposure via air from the inhalation of the vapors when they're doing the burning of the amulcam. But that's one that will affect mostly the miners involved in the process. However, the water, because the water is consumed directly from the environmental source by all of the community was a very important concern. I know the risk models that look at health impacts also include health, sorry, soil. And curiously enough, soil consumption is part of some of the models, especially I guess small children can be exposed in that way. But we thought, well, in terms of our possibilities of work and also considering the limitations because the research was very expensive and at the beginning we didn't have that much funding to work with, we just went with water. First and then we moved actually to look at the concentration of mercury in fish that is used by the community because they also fish from those rivers and they consume fish daily. So that's another source of exposure of methylmercury, which is the most toxic form of mercury. And yeah, I hope that we are able to gather more sources, more funding to be able to look at all of the other pathways that contribute to that problem. But yeah, I hope that answers the question. Oh no, that's a great answer. Thank you so much. I have some follow-up. So I have lots of questions about this. Just in the background, I did a project on e-waste recycling in Thailand and we were dealing with a lot of the similar things, heavy metals, what are the different pathways? One of the things that I wanna bring up and someone just posted a question about the desafios, the challenges that you have, particularly, I think, looking at the community and communicating in a real way the results of the work that you're doing. So you're saying it's triggered by the community, we're doing this project, but then we gotta give you the results because you wanna use it to make decisions about your life, right? Like how can we improve this situation? And so I know you mentioned it seemed really exciting. You talked about radio programs. I know from my work in Peru that like the radio was one of the main ways people got information. So I think that that sounds really exciting. Can you talk about how you maybe got to that method, but also you're doing all this sort of multifaceted sort of content creation, right? To be able to get to people in different ways. And I wonder what were some of the challenges that you guys have in terms of like, okay, great, let's make a radio program, but it seems like there's probably a lot there that it's not easy, right? So what are some of the challenges that you think you might see? If you were advising me to try and work with the community similarly in a different part of the world, what would you be looking at? What was your experience of, where are the main challenges to doing that type of communication? Thank you for the question. It's super interesting. It's usually difficult to trace back how did you have an idea, no? But basically what we have been doing is trying several things and by trying and sometimes succeeding and some other times not succeeding so well, then we have decided different parts. So what we are doing now, it's first of all to target the youngsters. So because we have seen through like social methods and very ethnographic approach to the mining settings that the population that is using Mercury the most are the new generations. The old generations are defending the traditional mining free of Mercury. So we thought, okay, now we have to focus on this community, this sector of the community. How do we do that? Well, the school, all the children in the region have to go to school, but let's not make it boring because they don't like to go to school. So let's make something that could be interesting. We have like the most important challenge there was the lack of internet connection. So we thought about doing something virtual like a video game at the beginning. Later we thought about an app and even though they have cell phones, the technology of the cell phones cannot carry an app. So we dropped that idea and we finally got to this one, which is like a presentation that moves on its own and that doesn't need internet connection. And we have done that development with designers that can translate these needs and like really take the opportunity to have some developments in that perspective as well. I lived in the territory for over a year when I was doing my PhD. So I know that not having internet and not having TV connection or not even a TV device, then radio becomes super relevant for entertaining. So what I thought was like, it's super cool if we can, for example, mix local music with some news about Mercury. And we developed that. And they also participate in the production. So there's voices that they can recognize us, people from the community talking about this. It's very exciting for them. Yeah, so what we did then was to interview some of the people that were already participating in the project, some of the social leaders that are recognized and like looked up by the youngsters. And with them, we made these radio programs. But we saw the opportunity of expanding the impact of the programs. So now we are looking at all the municipalities in the region, in the Kauka region, where there is also gold mining and where they can use the same information that we've learned and produced to also reflect on them. That's really amazing and inspiring stuff. And I'm seeing already some chats and some comments like, hey, we want to use the same type of approach. So very exciting to hear about that work. I believe that we have Louise, you're back on the line. So I think we're going to present your slides for you and then you're going to speak to us perhaps through another mode of internet. We're just talking about internet connectivity questions. So maybe next month we'll do a radio show. I don't know, we'll look into it. I hear it's very successful. But Louise, please take it away. And I think we're at the hotspots. You were talking about where you guys are working. Okay, great. Thank you very much. And apologies, believe it or not, I'm in San Francisco in the center of technology and my internet went down. So I'm doing this through my cell signal. So again, apologies. Okay, so I'm just going to sync my presentation to see what we're doing. I actually may ask to skip forward a few slides, but I will let you know so we can take it full advantage of the time. So these are the hotspots where ASGM works. So please advance to the next slide. Okay, next slide please. Mylin, next slide please. Do you see the slides moving? No, no we don't. This is a very exciting seminar for us today. It's troubleshooting across multiple time zones. There we go. All right. Okay, so, yes, okay. So that's great. So we work in Madrid at the Dios, next slide please. Okay, so it's on the triple border between Peru, Brazil and Bolivia, next slide please. This is a very rudimentary technology. What you're seeing here is a sluice made of materials from the forest that it's cut from, next slide. And basically these are folks that are just finding jobs from other areas of Peru, next slide. And they work in very rudimentary conditions. This is a sluice and some of the gravel pits that are created in the activity. Next slide please. They use high pressure water hoses to blast out river banks. And then process the slurry that's created through these sluices to concentrate gold flecks in the sediments found at the bottom of rivers. Next, they do use mercury. As mentioned before, this is illicitly sourced and used, next slide please. And it's used, of course, in conditions that are not optimal for the handling of such a dangerous mercury, I mean, product. So what you're seeing here are amalgams. And I'll ask to slow down the slides please. So amalgams are mercury and gold. What you see here is a person holding a 50% mercury 50% gold ball. Next slide please. So please go ahead to the next slide. So what you see here basically is the final product of that. Next slide please. Actually, let's pass these videos. I think they're just gonna take too much time at this point. Next slide please. Go pass this video. Okay, so, okay, yeah. So that you can hold there. So, Cynthia, if you could just click one slide, there's a small animation here. What we do is we focus on several aspects of the problem, reforestation, mercury in the environment, the use of artificial intelligence for analyzing satellite and drone data, policy intelligence and education. Next slide please. So these are the type of questions that we're interested in asking. So essentially, what kind of landscape damage is done by our T-cell scale goal mining? How does this compare for impacts on other drivers? And what is unknown about ASGM? And of course, what tools can we apply to develop to develop the reduction of these impacts and characterize them better? And in the future, what are the problems that are waiting for us in a climate uncertain future? Next slide please. In my view, this is an area that in the last 10 years has suffered about 150,000 hectares of loss, which by 370,000 acres. Next slide. We may have lost Luis again, but if I'm gathering from what is written on the slide, there is a significant reforestation and remediation ongoing with testing of various native Amazonian trees. Luis, I'm reading exactly what is on the slide on your behalf. Can you hear me? We can now. Okay, I'm sorry for the connectivity. So we are doing reforestation of these areas. So we work with forest engineers and other specialists to test over 70 species of native Amazonian trees for reforesting these areas. Next slide please. We also basically reverse and, well, kind of downscale engineer biochar reactors to create ways to inject carbon into the soil, both for carbon sequestration, but also for potential use in heavy metal attenuation in soils. And this is using waste biomass. So what you see here are basically the way that we can use agricultural waste to generate carbon that helps the trees grow better and potentially protect them from mercury contamination. We can, this is an area also that has a lot of transformation of landscapes. So next slide please. We use drones. Next slide. Where we custom built drones, we have different platforms, both fixed wing and rotors with a series of sensors. And this is under a laboratory in North Carolina. Next slide please. This is a small video that's just showing one of our drones taking off and starting to patrol automatically one of the areas. Basically it'll have a 60 kilometer flight plan and capture images in the area. Next slide please. And these yellow lines are essentially tracks that we use for monitoring places like La Pampa, which is one of the largest mining sites. And next slide. And that allows us to recreate in combination with not just the drone imagery, but satellite imagery combining to recreate the history of mining. This is 35 years of mining, illegal mining in the region. This is something published in 2018. And next slide, but also in combining sensors of different resolutions, we can get a lot more. Next slide. We have a team that focuses on using convolutional neural nets. This is basically machine learning for processing much of the imagery that we have because no longer do we have a data problem, we have a data analysis problem where we're trying to convert data into information for better use. Next slide. This essentially allows us to do facial recognition. So right now in this image, we see not only just deforestation areas, but we find tents and sluices and dredges and hoses and all kinds of mining equipment. Next slide. And what we're looking for is the ability to essentially do something like facial recognition. So next slide, where we can then find the pieces of machinery on the landscape that tell us whether deforestation is either happening now or will in the short future. Next slide. So this will supercharge our ability to be able to do this since we will be able to do this processing automatically in the cloud using some of the high resolution satellite imagery that is being made available daily. This allows us to also find dark mining and this is important for mercury contamination in areas because this is mining that is not currently easily found and it is something that we can... Next slide, please. That we can use that may be up to 10% of areas that are currently now being detected. Next slide. You can just move to the next slide. And we can use the neural nets to determine what these are because these are areas that are not only transformed in terms of beaches, but potentially reworked where mercury releases are happening in these areas. And this actually points to another thing too that mercury contamination is really driven in areas of transformation where forests are literally turned to water. Next slide, please. So 30% of the deforested land are converted to mining ponds and that's where mercury concentrates. Next slide, please. We use radar imagery to detect the complexity of the mining ponds. Next slide. And we find that up to 30% of the areas that are being deforested are essentially being lost that these trees will never grow back because they have no more soils grow on. So essentially, this is the creation of these wetlands. This was something that was reported by NASA from the International Space Station that actually saw this. So this was a story back in March. Next slide. And really it does actually create like this is the new hydroscape that defines what mercury releases are in certain parts of the Amazon. Next slide, please. In this area, mercury is being released at about a rate of 185 tons per year just in this region. So it's a tremendous amount of mercury. To be able to analyze this, we've created the first mercury laboratory in the Peruvian Amazon. So we have a DMA, which is a direct mercury analyzer. And we do all the processing there in mother videos in the field forward side. Next slide. We also have a very robust research field program where we do measurements of the entire food chain. So we're doing plankton, macroinvertebrates, sediments, soils, water, fish, and also people working in native communities. And some of these communities are very, very remote and very pristine areas. So next slide, please. To be able to get the measurements, we use a range of traditional techniques and more novel techniques. Next slide, please. Where we take soil cores and sediment samples at the bottom of these rivers. They're pulling some sediment cores, but we're also working with local universities for the use of not just drones in the air, but also drones on the water. And here there's one of the drones being put in one of the mining ponds. Next slide, please. To be able to take the temperature measurements, but also start to take samples that could be used for mercury analysis. And this is one of the papers that we had in Science Advances just last year talking about how these artificial lakes are really driving the pollution in many of these ecosystems. Nice slide, please. Mercury in air is also a very big problem because it actually not only gets locally deposited in soils, but also in trees and in urban areas. Next slide, please. So we worked with partners to create, to basically do this kind of downscale cost-effective sampling. Next slide, please. Because we need to know about mercury hot spots. So we worked with the University of Toronto to help deploy this passive air samplers where we're using simple small mercury, I mean small plastic jars, essentially, that have a sorbent and in particular diffusive barriers that allow diffusion rates at a very known temperature and some specialized sorbent. Next slide. And deployed them in very creative ways, both in natural areas. Next slide. And in urban areas. And this is easier said than done. And put them in urban areas, for example, here in the city of Puerto Maldonado, the capital of the region, next slide, please. To create hotspot maps based on empirical measurements at different concentrations. And this allows us to see where the mercury is. This is actually on the transect which is about 200 kilometers long. So it can be used at very fine scale, but also a very large scale to understand how this is being distributed through a region and also detect areas that are clandestine. So it can be kind of a discovery technique about where there's a listed releases of mercury across the landscape. Next slide, please. Of course, how this affects people as part of the work as well. This is with the Machiganga community in Manu National Park, an area that is far away from the mining zone, but has mercury issues of mercury contamination. Next slide, please. And in this case, we're not only testing soil, sediments and food, fish that they eat, but also a testing mercury in their hair. And hair is a really good biomarker for methylmercury which is the type of mercury that you get from consumption. So now just to kind of wrap up, what are the questions that we need to answer next? Many of them related are also related to wildfires. Next slide, please. This part of the Western Amazon is drying out. Basically, it's one of the areas that will suffer increased temperatures and lower humidities and because of climate change. And that means that there's an increase in incidents of wildfires. Actually, my co-PI on this project says presenting on fires in the Amazon right now. And so there is a distinct possibility of increased carbon and mercury releases due to these wildfires. So what does this mean and what does the scale up order? Next slide, please. And also do ASGM impacts change? Next slide with the type of mining. What you see here is hydraulic mining, which is kind of a low tech kind of mining, but there's also a technification of mining. If you can go back for just a slide, please. Yeah, so this is actually the use of heavy machinery, basically front loaders and bulldozers to do the mining. So what does that mean? Because they're still using mercury, so that release pattern is gonna be very different. So it's also an engineering question, not only from a kind of hydrological engineering, but also mining engineering, and then in the way that mercury will propagate through the ecosystem. Next slide, please. In terms of wildlife, how will wildlife return to these areas and how can wildlife be useful for natural regeneration of forests and for the recovery or the evolution of these aquatic ecosystems? We take a look at birds and bats as bioindicators because we can't have enough sensors essentially to put down in the landscape. So next slide. Can we find that some species have higher ability to absorb mercury and reflect what the mercury levels are in those areas? Next slide, please. And of course, in terms of policy, what's really important is like, what are the effects of social interventions on mining impacts and mercury and deforestation? So some are related to police actions. And of course, COVID is the big factor that's affecting everything. So how are things being affected? We need the ability to understand that. Next slide, please. So again, these problems is that we have high rates of deforestation, we have widespread mercury contamination, we have soil quality and carbon loss. We have the inability really to produce scientifically robust data in many of these areas. And we have low awareness and understanding, particularly for vulnerable populations. Next slide, please. And so we have a lot of tasks that I think that engineers like yourselves can help. And so one is provide scientific evidence for innovations. And this is important for decision-making. It's a common trope, but it's important that we have quality information if you want quality decisions to be made. And we need to increase the capacity of local scientists, technologists and institutions and also develop the tools for governance because the tools of governance is just not policy, but it's also the ability to generate robust data and to take evidence-based decisions. So this is useful for educating the public decision-makers that currently have a limited capacity experience for consuming this sort of information. And this goes to protecting vulnerable forest while in groups such as indigenous communities. So the opportunity for engaging with that really is kind of like built into the idea of the artisanal mining grand challenge. And this is the one that's focused on the Amazon. There was a first round of the artisanal mining challenge. And that's a global one. Now this is just focused on the Amazon. There's a million dollars in prizes for breakthrough innovations to improve the outcome, environmental outcome for ASGM. So the idea really is to provide the incentive for solution makers to engage not just from Latin America, but for Latin America, for the Amazon. And there are four sub-challenges, right? There is safeguarding the ecosystems, everything related to environmental outcomes. The other ones are related to the idea that there is optimizing the responsible supply chains. So it's the way that technology and engineering solutions can be used to make the supply chain for gold, more transparent, more responsible and tying the data that's collected in the field to what is essentially used for providing economic bonus or value that would be passed on to consumers for gold, the buyers. Whether it's a gold buyer in London or somebody buying a ring in a local mall in Indiana. And the other one is promoting sustaining reformalization. So this is basically how to support regulation in many of the countries and the eight countries that have this issue in the Amazon. Much of this is illegal or illicit. So effective regulation is gonna be key for maintaining these markets standing and being effective. So how can we leverage technology innovation to be able to support essentially the modern regulation of this huge sector, which is worth billions and billions of dollars. So we're not talking about them, something that's small. So I leave you with that. And again, apologies for the problems and I'm very glad that the organizers had the foresight to have me send over my slides in case something happened. So, and it did. So I will take any questions for the time we have left. Thanks very much. Well, thank you, Luis again. So just on that last note, we had a quick question come in. How much of the world's gold supply comes from artisanal gold mining? So you said it's billions of dollars. Obviously, gold is very expensive. So that's hard for us for me to translate into like percentage perhaps or is there information on this and what is sort of the function? That's right. Two key things about ASGM and artisanal and small scale gold mining. It's about 20% between 20 and 22% of the world's gold supply. So it's a significant amount. And also ASGM is the number one source of anthropogenic mercury emissions. So essentially most of the, it's about 40, 41% of mercury that's released in the world comes just from artisanal scale gold mining and it's about 20% of the world's gold supply. And it's essentially very poorly regulated. So it is very likely that artisanal scale gold mining is mixed in at most stages of the gold supply chain. So there is a very good chance that even if you go to a reputable dealer, let's say you go to your local mall and you buy a ring or a necklace or something that there could be some illegally mined gold in that. So this is kind of early days. It's more likely that you know where your coffee and orange juice comes from than you know where your gold is coming from. And that's a very important message to take away from that is one of the, there's much said about the Kimberly process with diamonds, with blood diamonds. And that really did transform that kind of luxury good but gold is really just starting off. And it's something that we really need to kind of bring up the speed. If I can buy my chocolate and I know what form it comes from and what the name of the farmer is, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask where gold is coming from. Yeah, that's a great point, Luis. And I wanna ask a follow-up question to that. I actually press for both Deanna, Irana and Luis to both here. I think that there's gonna be some obviously some sector specific challenges when you think about both the impacts of ASGM and also you're talking about governance or regulation and this difference, this spectrum between informal and formal and it's not a dichotomy. I think we understand that there's this sort of spectrum a continuous spectrum of like how formal something is and individual stakeholders within that where they fall on that spectrum. But I think my question is, you had these subfields in sort of the innovation prize, right? And a lot of the work that you presented was sort of generating this information or this data to say sort of, okay, like can we reveal what is perhaps private information, right? Like can we find out where and when and how this mining is happening, using drones or whatever, there's an engagement question I have like that's a more detailed technical question of like, what is the interaction with the community around flying drones and stuff? I think that when I worked in Peru, which was admittedly 15 years ago, I think the people I was working with would have been very skeptical of me flying drones, but I think that you obviously have a deeper set of collaborations and teams. I guess my question is, where is the real barrier to getting to that point to where you can have that sort of supply chain? So I noticed that like the challenges were supply chain and formalization, which are, you know, part of that is information, but what are some of the other challenges people can be thinking about, right? In terms of engaging with the different stakeholders and how to get different stakeholders and incentivize them to be, you know, working in this different way, like if we can both understand the cost, but I wanna think about what are some of these other challenges that you're seeing in those particular subfields, in subchallenges, if that makes sense. Well, for supply chains, like the one that's really touted now is blockchain, because part of the challenge is being able to transmit the information about where the gold is sourced and where it's produced and then transmitting it up to a value chain. So, you know, if a consumer is going to pay extra, basically just think about kind of like organic coffee. It costs up a few bucks more. Essentially the idea is the same, that good behavior is rewarded by a premium. That information needs to be verified all the way through the chain or else it drops. Like once that link is broken, then no one's gonna say, hey, I'm gonna pay an extra couple bucks or, you know, hundreds of dollars for something that's responsible, both in terms of labor responsibility, social responsibility, and environmental responsibility. So the way that that is verified has a lot to do with technology. There could be remote sensing and just making sure that the area that it's being mined is correct and is following some route or it's not deforesting things. It could be the way that you just maintain the signal through digital means. Blockchain is something that I mentioned. Also how do you, are there ways to use material physics to understand where gold comes from? We work with physical chemists, the material chemists for using isotopes for not just isotopes for mercury, but isotopes for gold. There are very few, but essentially, how do you use those types of solutions to understand where metals come from? So they're not being swapped because the elicitness gives a lot of incentives to cheat. So those are some examples of how you can do that. Of course through platforms and accountability, data chains, it's important to maintain that. For formalization and the use for just the regulation, maybe we think of it as kind of like both carrot and stick. Maybe the supply chain is more of the carrot and the formalization regulation is a bit more of the stick because you have to be taxes and you have to comply with laws. It provides the tools for governments to be able to regulate it effectively. Generally ASGM is done in areas that are very remote and hard to go there. I think that you've worked in areas as well that are like Mother of the Dios and these Amazon areas. I mean, they're very far away. They're not close to the present state. So, and if there are agents of the state that usually are underfunded. So it's actually very difficult to do this. So are there ways to do this remotely? Are there ways to do this at lower costs? Is there a way to basically transform data into information? So it's used by folks that are not used to this. So this is something, as you mentioned drones, it was something new 15 years ago but essentially everyone's got drones now. So it is not so unusual, but it becomes kind of like a cascade of problems. Before it's hard to get drones, then becomes hard to get the data from drones. And now you have so much data you're drowning in it. How do you transform that into information using AI or something like this? And then how do you actually do the training? And this is something that colleagues in Columbia had talked about. How do you train people up to be able to use the data, absorb them and make decisions? So lots of entry points, I think. And a lot of creativity and imagination is what I think we're looking for because a lot of these problems are not new, but the scale of the problems are growing faster than the scale of the solutions. So I think that we wanna move away from the usual suspects and bring in more people to think about this. We need more minds and we need a lot of really, a lot of young energy, I think, to kind of join the people that have been working at this for many years. I've been working on it for better part of 20 years because I think that we're plateauing. And that's, I think the last thing I wanna say about this is that we need more hands to this job because it's outstripping the ability for the current solution makers to get a handle on it. It's growing. The price of gold basically drives this in 80 countries and it's accelerating because of the pandemic and all everything there. So that's one of the also reasons why I think that we need to really engage on this issue. Thank you, Luis, for outlining so many problems. I wanna ask a one question. I think perhaps then we're gonna have to wrap up looking at the time. But Luis, you're talking about a lot of these sort of decision makers, we're getting information for these decision makers. And what I'm really interested in is that there's this system of different decision makers who objectives I imagine are not all aligned. And I wanna pose this to our Colombian colleagues here. You guys, it seems have spent a lot of effort really thinking about both dissemination of information to a variety of stakeholders. Using a variety of avenues. But I'm wondering about, we have these sort of society level problems where de-forcing the Amazon or we have mercury pollution in a community. But I imagine the community is not all aligned. It's not a monolith. So you have these stakeholders who might have different views. And how did you guys sort of approach stakeholders within the same system that might have different needs or need information in different ways to have different beliefs about the system? And in trying to maybe not necessarily build consensus but get actionable improvement on using this new information that you guys are generating through monitoring, right? So I imagine that if you're directly involved in gold mining in a particular way, there's differences between the gold miners also, right? So I'm just saying with this variety of stakeholders, how did you guys approach sort of the different objectives and how that made you think about your strategy for trying to get improvement on the outcomes you care about? Okay, thank you for the question. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And I think that not only like all communities are heterogeneous within but also the use of mercury creates difference. So for example, the miners, maybe defenders of the use of mercury whereas the women that have to be responsible of the unhealthy children, they are against mercury and then we have this kind of gender inhibitions but also family ruptures that come with the use of gender. So the first thing was to actually realize that difference and try to understand it and understand what are like the variables that make the difference. And we then came with the gender difference and also the gender difference. And then from that realization, we decided to first focus in the youngsters because we knew that by educating the youngsters then later they could take better decisions. And also we have tried to make workshops with the miners because something that we discover as well is that some of them that used to use traditional mining are now incorporating the use of mercury to try to make more profit. And that's something very relevant because I mean, this is like an impoverished community. So it's also a social and economic problem and we have to deal with that dimension as well. So it's not only to criminalize the miners that are using mercury but try to understand where is it coming from and how can we solve it. So the solutions are not only technological, the solutions are also social and economical. And with those miners, first of all, we have tried to educate them as well because we are sure that if they understand that this is also going to generate problems for them then they can also make better decisions. But we know for certain that they still need the transition and they need some opportunities to do it different and that's something that is also a responsibility of the government. And this is when things become very difficult because the government is very good at criminalizing and persecuting and making those miners illegal but it's not so efficient at providing solutions or at providing monitoring and other alternatives for the communities. So we are trying to compensate that through education basically. And we are very like we believe that education can be a root out. And we work with the social organizations from the territory. So we have decided to always like dialogue with them and to try to make sure that we are on the same level in terms of what is the objective and where are we taking this information and these results too. Actually what we have discovered is that in many cases the institutions are like in opposing positions as compared to communities. So the institutions may be pushing for example for formalization and for making a corporate mining. So they call formalization but really what they want is to make corporate business and the local communities, the ethnic communities they want to continue being small. They don't want to transition to corporate large-scale mining. So there is like this attention between what the community wants and what the national government wants. And part of the challenge is to understand the politics of the mining setting. What are the forces? What are the interests? And having said that I wanted to take the opportunity to react to something that Luis just mentioned in relation to where is the problem coming from and when I heard that the prices of gold are generating this boom, this rush for gold. I think it's also very relevant to control the demand for gold and what is the responsibility of the financial sector in all these cows because it's very easy to go to the poor chain. So the poor people from the Amazon that are trying to make a living out of gold mining of course being damaging for the environment and damaging for the health but where is the responsibility of the financial sector that are the people who have the money and that could be controlled in the global north? So I think that kind of like global dynamics have to be taken into consideration. Yeah, I will try to add just in the context of how technology and technology that produces information is used to produce this data. I think in this situation is very important to keep in mind that the context and knowing the context is extremely important. For instance, Luis shared some pictures of Peru and flying the drones there. If you try to fly a drone like that in Latoma is going to be taken down by an armed group that we don't know where is like where the fires coming from. So, we really need to in our context that these in Colombia work from the bottom up and include the communities. And that's just also part of our philosophy for this research and how we want to approach this problem. You can think about top-down solutions involving governmental organizations and companies and all that. But we decided to go the other way around and take the challenge from the bottom. And that's just our approach and that's how we do it. But we understand that that's different depending on the context. Yeah, that's... Well, this is why we had multiple people presenting today. I want to take a moment to just thank all of our participants for staying with us past. I think that's really my fault as the moderator because I was so excited to hear the responses from Luis, Diana and Irene. I want to personally thank all three of you both for sharing your own work, publicizing the prize that is coming up and hopefully giving up connections, making new connections with people that are either working in the same areas or in the same zone or as Luis said, inspiring new people to work in this area. I'm going to include myself in that number. Someone that's now very excited to connect with you guys later and work on artisanal gold binding. I think it is a very important problem and I think it is a systemic problem. As you mentioned, Diana, there's going to be lots of approaches. There's no a part in the pun here, gold bullet that's going to solve this problem. But we need lots of people working on this with lots of innovations. I think there's opportunity for technology. There's opportunity for policy. There's opportunity for lots and lots of different leverage points to try and improve the situation. I think we can see the existential impacts that are happening right now just through photos. And I'm going to turn it over to Diana, but I just want to thank all three of you again for sharing your time, working through the technical difficulties, answering questions being so flexible and so passionate and doing such great work. So I want to thank all three of you. And I will turn it over to Diana and I want to thank our participants one last time. So, Diana, please take it away. Thank you, Jesse. I don't think I can say it better than that. I definitely echo the need for all hands on deck and whatever we can do with engineering for change to support this effort, please consider us your art and champions. So with that, I'd like to thank all of our attendees and of course our presenters. We are going to get you back to your regularly scheduled programming. And hopefully we will see you all at the next seminar. Please stay tuned for the recording while we published on engineering for change and we will attempt to address many of the questions that we couldn't tackle with follow-up on our platform. So thank you, everyone. Good afternoon, good evening. Good morning, even if wherever you are and we'll see you on the next E4C seminar. Take care. Thank you all.