Conventional approaches to monitoring and tackling illegal deforestation don’t always get to the root of the problem. Many independent observation programmes depend on costly and inefficient field missions by international and national NGOs. New advances in satellite forest monitoring have transformed our ability to detect forest loss but may not show us what is causing it and can be detached from local realities and law enforcement systems.

Our community forest monitoring initiative aims to change this by unlocking the potential of traditional forest guardians in monitoring and protecting their forest lands. At the heart of this is ForestLink – a breakthrough system that enables communities to transmit highly accurate and low cost geographical alerts on illegal forest activities in real-time – even in remote areas where there are no telecommunication networks.

ForestLink can also show patterns of non-enforcement – for example where lack of verification or enforcement from officials on community alerts may be evidence of collusion with illegal loggers. Making available data on this to different stakeholders can improve forest governance by going beyond narrow measures of legality and can be used to a tool to monitor implementation of agreements between timber producer and buyer countries.