Category — Conservation

As part of this years International Day of Climate Action on October 24th, 350.org – with support from Tactical Technology Collective – are planning a new and innovative text messaging campaign designed to mobilise citizens around the world

“Project MOBiLIZE” will use decentralised, country-specific FrontlineSMS servers to deliver targeted messaging blasts to 350.org supporters in over twenty countries. The project will also collect SMS reports after the October 24th main event and deliver them to world leaders via Twitter, web and projection at the UN Climate Talks due to take place in Copenhagen in December.

This is how it works. To start things off, the 350.org central server sends out an SMS to each of the country nodes, taking into account timing, language and message. Cost is minimal – just 20 international messages, one per node. Once the message is received, the country nodes automatically blast it out to lists of in-country mobile numbers, sourced from 350.org and local partner organisations. Costs are approximately 5 cents per SMS. Cascading SMS this way reduces costs considerably, and allows better local control.

Country nodes can also collect new mobile numbers through the FrontlineSMS servers, using SMS keywords and by publicising country-specific phone numbers on the web and at events.

This is the first time FrontlineSMS has been used to ‘cascade’ messages to and from the local level through a chain of servers. It could also be a first for any grassroots global SMS campaign, and if it works could present an exciting new model for others to follow. Not only is the system cheaper to run but it presents the potential for considerably wider reach, and thanks to some neat work by Bobby - the brains behind it - the pre-configured software can be quickly adopted in any country.

If you are interested in taking part in this ground-breaking campaign, either as an in-country node or in any other capacity, post a comment here, check out Bobby’s post on the FrontlineSMS Community pages

NEWS UPDATE

The 350.org website has a post about the project
Tactical Tech also have a post here

ACCESS POINTS

New numbers are being added all the time. Here are the various local access points as at 12th October:

USA – 30644
Australia – 0411694094
Maldives – 9900350
Macedonia – 077594209
Philippines – 09088770350
Hong Kong – 85262757489
Panama – Coming Soon!
New Zealand – 0226070672
Israel Coming – Soon!
Malaysia – 0163050973
Cambodia – 081666120
Sweden – 0733185314
Germany – Coming Soon!
India – Coming Soon!
Lebanon – Coming Soon!

I’ve been friends with Lawrence and Gladys Zikusoka – founders of Conservation Through Public Health (CTPH) – for a few years after meeting them in Stockholm at an ICT4D conference. Our meeting was particularly exciting because of our shared interest in technology and primate conservation, and because of my previous conservation work in Uganda, the country where they’re based.

Today Lawrence sent me an email with news that Gladys had won an award. This is fantastic news, and incredibly well deserved. I’ve been an admirer and supporter of their work for some time, and it’s great to see them continue to get great traction and recognition for their efforts.

CTPH promotes conservation and public health by improving primary health care to people and animals in and around protected areas in Africa. You can see a video of Gladys and her work below, courtesy of the Daily Telegraph website.

(Gladys, Lawrence – remember you owe me a trip to Bwindi!)

Breathing Earth is described as a “real-time simulation which displays CO2 emissions from every country in the world, as well as their birth and death rates”. The data used comes from reputable sources, although the site admits that a simulation on this scale can never be 100% accurate. Worryingly, they note that the CO2 emission levels shown are much more likely to be too low than too high.Yikes.

This is a fascinating site, and one which throws up numbers on a scale large enough to scare the best of us. Since I started writing this brief blog post, for example, the world population has risen by over 2,000 and total CO2 emissions have exceeded an incredible 760,000 tons. The United States alone was responsible for approximately 175,000 of that.

If you ever need reminding of the relentless march of global population growth, and the increasing impact that our growing numbers are having on the planet, there can’t be many sites better than this.

I’ve been meaning to finish this post for a while now – it’s been sitting in “draft” mode for the past couple of months. It took a talk by Nathan Wolfe at TED last week – live-blogged by good friends Erik Hersman and Ethan Zuckerman – which finally got me thinking again. Nathan’s talk on bush meat, primates and conservation in Africa drove Erik to make an impassioned call to action:

It really challenged me to think about local communities in Africa and their needs, and I’m thinking hard on what would it really take to replace this type of activity… Please, join me in thinking about this

Now, I’m no expert on primate conservation, bush meat hunting or conservation more broadly, but I did spend the best part of a year trying to understand it. Cercopan is a small NGO based in Calabar, southern Nigeria, which aims to “conserve Nigeria’s primates through sustainable rainforest conservation,  community partnerships,  education, primate rehabilitation and research”. I arrived there in late 2001 keen to understand what primate conservation really looked like – i.e. on the ground.

I wasn’t the only arrival that December day. A small baby chimpanzee had been confiscated (pictured) from a local market and was waiting to be collected from Lekki, a conservation and education centre in Lagos run by the Nigerian Conservation Foundation. Primate rescue was to be a theme of my time in Nigeria, as was a sense that a large part of the ‘conservation effort’ was really damage limitation and control. Rehabilitating orphaned primates was often the easier part – even though it was hugely challenging and distressing. Changing perceptions, overcoming local politics and trying to shift cultural mindsets turns out to be much harder. Not only that, it takes considerably longer, time that increasing numbers of species simply don’t have.

Primate conservation, bush meat hunting and deforestation are all inextricably linked. Tackling one without trying to address the others simply doesn’t work. In its simplest form, the whole thing goes something like this.

Loggers enter the forest and either blanket cut or selectively cut trees. Paths and roads are opened up into areas which were previously difficult or impossible to access. Loggers need to eat, and many actively hunt for bush meat while working in the forest. Local hunters join in. As more trees are cut and more roads laid, hunters are able to penetrate deeper into the forest, reducing wildlife populations – primates included – yet further

If I were to summarise what I learnt about these complex issues from my time in southern Nigeria, I would break it down into the following categories.

The practical

Although large-scale logging is a significant problem – often carried out by larger (almost always foreign) companies – many poor local people are ‘recruited’ to help in the destruction. Equipped with chainsaws supplied by their employers, they enter community forests and national parks and selectively cut high-worth trees. Roads and paths are cut to remove the logs, which are sometimes cut into large planks before being shipped off. Forestry officials, many of whom haven’t been paid for months, stamp the trees as coming from a legitimate source. I will never forget the haunting sound of distant chainsaws as I walked through those forests.

The cultural

Speaking with the locals in Calabar, many find it inconceivable that people would ever eat primates. In many communities it’s simply taboo, but sadly the same can’t be said for killing them. As outsiders come in search of work, and as main roads open up alongside the fringes of rainforest, hunters from these communities will go in, track down wildlife – primates included – and sell them at the side of the the road. Bush meat is in great demand (see below), and it’s a brisk trade. If a mother is killed then the infant will be sold as a pet – a double bounty for the hunter. Some of these orphans are incredibly young, and barely alive if they are lucky enough to be rescued, as this picture distressingly shows.

The perception

The many Nigerians I met believed that bush meat was much better for you than ‘farmed’ meat, and given the choice they’d rather eat something from the forest than a farm. This is a major challenge for conservation groups trying to ween people off bush meat and more towards livestock of various descriptions (see below). As a case in point, some Nigerians living in London appear to be willing to pay significant amounts of money for illegally imported bush meat, despite the availability of almost any other kind of meat from legal, local sources such as London supermarkets (see this interesting story reported by the International Primate Protection League).

The response

Conservation groups on the ground spend huge amounts of time on education and alternative livelihoods and farming programmes. In the 1990’s there was considerable focus on the potential for “grasscutters” – a widely-distributed cane rat found in West and Central Africa – and how farming and breeding these could help reduce or replace reliance on bush meat for protein. I’m not sure how many of these projects were successful, although some research has been carried out and there has been some success by individuals in Ghana. From my own observations, keeping livestock of any kind (other than chickens or turkeys, which need little looking after) turned out to be a foreign concept to many people, and efforts to promote it largely failed.

The reality

Speak with the hunters in almost any rural community and there is almost universal recognition that the wildlife is on the decline. Many fondly speak of overnight hunting expeditions with their fathers, and how they’d return the next morning with a healthy ‘catch’. Evidence of distant permanent overnight camps highlight today’s reality – longer trips, days in length, but ones which still don’t guarantee a single kill. Urban dwellers rarely see this reality. Ask them about conservation and wildlife, and their reaction is one of “the monkeys will never finish” (Nigerians often use the term “finish” to describe extinction). Nigerians clearly have much to learn from each other.

It would have been great to have ended my time in Nigeria with a solution to some of these problems, and even better to be able to outline a few of them in this post. But I didn’t, and I don’t.

What I can contribute is this, though…

Things you can do

Firstly, take a little time to try and understand the problems – plural. It frustrates me to read blanket condemnation in the western media of local people in African countries cutting down forests and daring to kill cute chimpanzees. Yes, it’s sad and its destructive. I’ve seen at first hand the pain and distress of an orphaned primate who’s had to have an arm broken to release the grip on its dead mother, or the look in the eyes of exhausted parents struggling to put a decent meal on the table for their children. The problems are complex, but they’re human and animal.

Secondly, join a local organisation working with local communities on the ground. If you’re interested in African primates in particular, a good place to start out is the Pan African Sanctuary Alliance (PASA), an organisation committed to the conservation and care of African primates through the support of in-situ sanctuaries.

Thirdly, if you’re the volunteering kind, check out the University of Wisconsin’s Primate Info Net, but bear in mind that volunteering is really only productive if the local organisation can’t find, or afford, a local version of you among the communities in which they work. If that’s the case, be sure you have a transferrable skill so you can train a local person to replace you when you leave. Sustainability isn’t always financial – it also has a human element to it, too.

Finally, find out about alternative conservation/human strategies such as direct conservation payments – different models do exist. Just as primate species are different, so must be the conservation strategies to help protect them. One size rarely fits all, and this is true whether you’re an elephant, a forest, a primate or a local villager.

This is a diagram for Bushmail, a system which allows users in very remote locations to send email using high-frequency radio signals. No need for a mobile signal, no need for cell towers and no need for any infrastructure. A wire strung up over a tree is enough to act as a transmitter/receiver, and a car battery and a solar panel enough to power the whole thing. Used quite widely among the conservation community, could this be the ideal data/email solution for an ‘off-network’ African village?
This is a Motorola walkie-talkie. With a range of approximately ten square kilometres, these radios allow two-way voice communication without the need for a mobile signal, no need for cell towers and no need for any additional infrastructure. An ideal voice solution for communication within and around a remote African village?

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about intermediate technology, the ‘other’ name for appropriate technology but one which, going by my thinking, promises more of a bridge to an “optimum technology solution” rather than one trying to be an out-and-out replacement for it. A stop-gap, in other words. I’ve also been thinking about how people communicate within rural communities. When we talk about connectivity, who are we trying to connect people to? In my latest PC World article – “Where walkie-talkies dare” – I ask:

Imagine, say, 75% of a rural community’s communication needs were local, in other words among itself, and most of that community lived in, say, a 10- or 15-square-kilometre area. You could argue that a for-profit mobile network, likely run by a diesel-powered tower, is an inappropriate and over-the-top technology solution. Other technologies already exist that could do the job, technologies that don’t operate on a pay-per-use basis and don’t need costly infrastructure to work

If you want two great examples of these kinds of technologies, just look up.

Despite the spectacular advance of mobile, large swathes of some of the more remote communities in the developing world still remain disconnected – not just from us, but also from each other. While mobile technology is widely regarded by many as the ultimate solution, many communities stand little chance of getting on the radar of the “mobile for development” community until they firstly get on the radar of the mobile operators, and a tower appears somewhere in or near their village. Although exciting things happen when towers appear, I’d argue that waiting years for one to come is probably unnecessary. Turning again to my PC World article:

Right now, a traders cooperative in a rural village could easily equip itself with walkie-talkies and exchange information on commodity prices and produce availability, to organise transport and to share storm forecasts. Health care workers covering the village and nearby area could use them to communicate and technically coordinate a health care network. And why not have Village Phone Operators (VPOs) with walkie-talkies rather than mobile phones, who can sell the use of their devices for a small fee, with a near 100% profit margin? Maybe this is a new model Grameen Phone could do something with?

I’d be fascinated to hear if anyone has carried out research on the local communication needs of rural communities. How much of what they need to say is predominantly local? If my ‘grab-it-out-of-the-air’ figure of 75% is even remotely close – and we put any technology snobbery aside for a moment – then I think there could be very real opportunities to implement some very effective intermediate technology solutions within some of these communities.

So, my questions are these: Are there projects out there implementing these solutions right now? Are they working? What other (better?) options are available? What do the communities think of them? Maybe this is all just a crazy idea? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Last summer things began to take a turn for the worst for the worlds’ mountain gorilla population. Stuck between warring rebels, government troops and local populations, the deaths of a mother and infant took the 2007 death toll to nine. An estimated 380 mountain gorillas live in the Virunga National Park and surrounding volcanoes region, representing more than half the world’s population.

Of course, it’s not only the wildlife that’s suffering. Since 1998 an estimated five million people have died, with hundreds of thousands more displaced by the troubles. With many living in refugee camps, there’s increasing pressure on the environment, particularly for fuel wood. The Virunga National Park is an obvious – and worrying – target for those who find themselves within reach.

But despite the troubles, the conservation efforts continue. According to Wikipedia:

Land invasions and intense poaching have challenged the park authorities to the limit, but most rangers have remained active. Since 1994 about 120 rangers have been killed in the line of duty protecting the park from illegal poaching and land acquisition. Amongst other military activity, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) have been been using the park as a safe haven when they come under sustained attack, such as Laurent Nkunda’s offensives against them between April and May 2007

Back in 2003, as part of a project called wildlive!, I worked with an international conservation organisation – Fauna & Flora International (FFI) – to help them explore how mobile phones could be used to help raise money and awareness for gorilla conservation and local livelihoods. We ended up with a game called “Silverback”, an eight-level epic taking the player through the life of a mountain gorilla from birth through to adulthood. The game was very well received by the mobile gaming industry, scoring highly in their reviews. Sadly, three years later the service was pulled. The game was dragged down with it and forced into early ‘virtual’ retirement.

After becoming increasingly aware of the escalating conflict last October, it occurred to me that the time was right for “Silverback” to return. Thinking through what would need to be done to bring the game back to life, I realised that I knew enough people to make it happen relatively easily and for little cost. Six months later the game has been updated, re-built to support newer phones and re-launched via a new www.silverbackers.org website.

Back in 2003 there were more barriers to getting a mobile game to market than you could throw a stick, or mobile, at. Sadly, little has changed. To combat this and to keep costs down, avoid administrative headaches and to give us global coverage, we decided to follow Radiohead’s example and allow people access to the product first for free, and let them decide how much they think it’s worth. They can then choose whether or not they want to donate to the cause, something which we obviously hope they will. In order to leverage the power of social networking, we have also set up a Silverbackers Facebook Group for people to join and show their support.

With no funding this is going to be a purely viral marketing affair. The whole project is highly experimental, too. How we measure success is unclear, but sometimes the best way to find out is to do.

To download “Silverback” on your phone, visit the Silverbackers Download page (and remember to donate!).

Back in the summer of 2005, a few friends and colleagues gathered in a corner of the Commonwealth Club in London. There were environmentalists, conservationists, communications experts, senior mobile industry executives, businesspeople and a couple of potential investors. What brought us there was the Galileo Masters, an annual competition which awards incubation opportunities for innovative satellite navigation applications. FrontlineSMS development was just about to begin, kiwanja.net was beginning to grow and it was a time rich in ideas. Not surprisingly for a meeting dominated by conservationists, it was an environmental application which won through. On 8th June 2005, our Mobile Environmental Monitoring Device was born. Our idea was this.

A Mobile Environmental Monitoring Device (MEMD), tracked by Galileo, would gather environmental information as people move through their landscapes. Indicators such as temperature, air quality, CO₂ levels and air pressure would be recorded along with a fix on each location. For the first time individuals will be able to monitor their own exposure to local, relevant environmental hazards. Although initially a standalone unit, MEMD could converge with other technologies in the future, such as mobile phones and PDAs, providing enhanced functionality and communications ability. Each data set, gathered by each MEMD unit, would provide the user with a snapshot of the state of their environment

The idea was a bit on the grand side (see a bigger diagram) and we didn’t win, which was probably a good thing since none of us really knew if the thing was possible. MEMD was consigned to the archives like an earlier mobile payments concept (which has also since taken off). I started work on another project which later became FrontlineSMS, and life moved on.

The idea was well and truly buried until recently, when I came across this – the Nokia Eco Sensor Concept. According to Nokia:

Our visionary design concept is a mobile phone and compatible sensing device that will help you stay connected to your friends and loved ones, as well as to your health and local environment. You can also share the environmental data your sensing device collects and view other users’ shared data, thereby increasing your global environmental awareness

Interestingly, their monitoring device pairs with a mobile phone – which was what we had in mind – collects similar kinds of environmental data, allows it to be shared and aggregated and is designed to increase environmental awareness. It looks like we were just a little early on this one.

Ideas, of course, are one thing. Having the resources to execute them is another (something which, to this day, remains a challenge). Back in 2005 we were left to wonder if MEMD would ever have been possible.

Two years later, Nokia have shown us that it is.

I once caused a stir during a regular Friday night pub outing in Cambridge when I dared suggest that some people only worked in international conservation because it meant they got to visit cool places and work with exotic animals. Although some were a little shocked at my suggestion and strongly disagreed (I was, after all, out with a dozen or so conservationists) the very fact that they responded in such a manner proves that I may have just hit a nerve.

There can be little dispute that entire industries are built around the act of ‘international conservation and development’. And few are headquartered in developing countries, an irony in itself. I’m not sure if there are any official figures – please get in touch if you know of any – but the international conservation and development communities must be a considerable source of employment in the ‘developed’ world. Large percentages of allotted funding seem to have the habit of staying in-country and covering items such as head office salaries, rents, vehicles, meetings and other overheads. Why, entire conferences are built around, and funded, on single conservation or development themes. I’ve even been to a few.

There is much talk of local empowerment, local context and local ownership, but such an approach rarely suits a machine which needs considerable amounts of funding just to keep itself alive. Gerald Durrell (pictured), the late pioneering conservationist based in my home island of Jersey, always maintained that his ultimate aim was to secure the future of endangered species and their habits, and then close down his zoo. Job done.

The global conservation and development movement could have learnt a thing or two from this guy.

Out of the six billion-or-so people on the planet, two out of three probably aren’t in much of a position to do anything about it right now. They’re either too busy trying to get their next meal together, or scratching a living off a few dollars or less a day. We’re talking climate change, and as citizens of the developed world we’re being told more and more that we should take our share of responsibility and act. After all, we’re the lucky ones who can.

In the UK, climate change is top of the agenda. I’ve been back only a week and the newspapers are full of adverts and government advice on how we, as consumers, should be doing our bit. We have an incredibly important role to play, yet many of us still don’t yet seem to realise it. Why aren’t we getting the message? Is asking people to walk the short distance to a local shop really such a problem? Or to not leave things on standby? Or to turn the heating down a notch or two and put a jumper on? On the plus side people at least seem more aware of climate change. But getting them to take that next step and change their habits seems, for many, to be an “ask too far”.

In an attempt to speed them along, Christian Aid have recently been running some hard hitting newspaper campaigns in the UK (I’m not sure if they’re doing the same in the US). At the same time, interest continues to grow in devices such as “standby savers”, which will do what most consumers appear resistant to do and kill the power to their beloved consumer devices when they’re not being used. As a recent Economist article explains:

“Strange though it seems, a typical microwave oven consumes more electricity powering its digital clock than it does heating food. For while heating food requires more than 100 times as much power as running the clock, most microwave ovens stand idle – in standby mode – more than 99% of the time. And they are not alone. Many other devices, such as televisions, DVD players, stereos and computers also spend much of their lives in standby mode, collectively consuming a huge amount of energy”

If doing something as simple as unplugging things at the wall at night reduces energy consumption in the home by as much as 20%, why are so few people doing it? Maybe breaking the global population down into segments may help us understand behaviourally why some people may or may not be interested – or care – about the climate change issue.

Here’s a very rough attempt for starters:

We start with a world population of: 6 billion
We deduct those unable to engage for economic reasons, leaving us with: 2 billion
We deduct those who don’t believe climate change is happening, leaving: 1 billion
We deduct those who believe in it but don’t think it’s ‘our’ doing, leaving: 600 million
We deduct those who believe it’s ‘our’ doing but not causing problems: 450 million
Deduct those who think it’s ‘our’ doing and a problem, but don’t care: 375 million
Deduct those who think it’s ‘our’ doing and a problem, but feel helpless: 300 million

On the basis of these very, very rough figures, it looks as though only 300 million people, or approximately 5% of the total world population, would actually be willing or able to change their behavioural habits based on the climate change issue. For the environmentalists, this segment would be classed as “in the bag”, so-to-speak. We have a number of segments above this hardcore group, and these are the ones needing to be targeted by advertising and educational campaigns. Clearly each segment would require a different ‘marketing’ approach based on a range of unique drivers for their non-engagement, and maybe this is what’s been missing.

I wonder if anyone is working on this?

Al Gore has done an amazing job of publicising the global warming phenomenon. Road shows, documentary films and books have all at one time or another been conduits for his environmental message. And powerful it is. But the problem remains little understood, it seems, in the American press. Many of those that bother to take any interest still maintain that global warming is a myth, or some kind of conspiracy by the Greens, or just plain wrong. The truth, inconvenient as it may be, is that there is absolutely no dispute among scientists that the planet is warming. Whatever chart or computer model you look at quite clearly shows that the environment is warming, that it started to increase at an unprecedented rate following the industrial revolution, and that last year was the warmest on record (even beating 2005 which, ironically, was previously the warmest).

The dispute is whether or not human activity is the cause of this unprecedented warming, or whether what we’re seeing – or should that be feeling? – is just part of a natural cycle. But it makes a complex subject even more difficult for everyday folk to grasp when even the press don’t seem to be able to explain the basis of the argument properly. Maybe it’s another ploy by lobbyists, that strange ‘phenomenon’ that seems to dominate so much of American politics.

Today the west coast of the United States, around California, was several degrees warmer than it should have been. I had a great time chilling out in my VW camper van. Bees were busy pollinating newly bloomed flowers (not a good sign) and people were busy walking around in t-shirts, eating ice cream, enjoying the sunshine. Ski resorts further inland were shut just like many in Europe, with absolutely zero snow to speak of. And experts interviewed for one of the national TV stations didn’t seem to think it had anything to do with global warming. No wonder people on the street are confused. In a nation which more than any needs to take serious action, they aren’t even at the point of acceptance, let alone action. By all means dispute the causes of global warming, because democratic processes allow that, but don’t deny that it’s happening, please! That doesn’t help anyone.

If Al Gore was to write a sequel to his ‘Inconvenient Truth’ it should probably be called ‘Cruel Irony’. Because the cruel irony of the whole global warming saga is that it’s going to be those people, and most likely those countries, which have done least to contribute to the problem that will suffer the most. Once again, Africa looks like being particularly hard hit. But in one further twist, Australia – one of the few industrialised countries which sides with the United States and disputes global warming, and refuses to even discuss curbing greenhouse emissions – is right now suffering what many believe to be its most severe drought in a thousand years. Politicians, fuelled by public opinion, increasing concern and a steep rise in farmer suicides, have finally begun facing up to the possibility that something really is happening. For many, if this is the future for Australia then something needs to be done, and fast. Better late than never.

The United States has suffered its fair share of adverse weather over the past year or so, with the destruction in New Orleans dominant in most people’s minds, and a record hurricane season to boot. But many Americans haven’t yet had their ‘Australia moment’, nothing major enough to cause a big enough shift of opinion. But how major does it have to be – bigger than Hurricane Katrina?

That change will come. Americans won’t be immune forever. But for all of our sakes, please make it sooner rather than later. The clock is ticking for all of us.