On the 50th anniversary of World Environment Day, Huawei and IUCN highlighted smart solutions for supporting effective and fair management and governance of protected and conserved areas, and the growing importance of technology in tracking threatened species and protecting their natural habitats.
Huawei and IUCN outlined a vision for protected and conserved areas, to leverage digital technology to help achieve global biodiversity goals.
At the summit, the Smart Protected Areas White Paper was launched, jointly developed by Huawei, IUCN China and the Chinese Academy of Forestry, to share the blueprint for building smart protected areas, based on experience from China’s protected areas.
The key to wildlife protection is understanding distribution, behaviours, seasonal trends of species, and how human activities may impact their patterns. This requires extensive data, which can be challenging to attain given remote and hard-to-access areas, often exacerbated by extreme weather.
Early data collection and research efforts relied on scientists going into the field to install camera traps to capture images. These cameras needed to be maintained, their batteries replaced, and their memory cards replaced and analysed; time – and labour-intensive processes that frequently resulted in data and images that were several months old.
Implementing next-generation digital technologies, such as cloud computing, IoT, mobile Internet, big data, and AI enables real-time data acquisition and interaction. This is key to improving smart sensing, analysis and management of species protection and area-based conservation efforts, making them more effective and thereby better at conserving nature.
Since 2019, Huawei has worked alongside over 30 global partners, including IUCN, to apply digital technologies to achieve effective conservation and restoration outcomes in 46 protected and conserved areas worldwide, from tropical rainforests in China's Hainan – home to the world’s rarest gibbon, to wetland oasis in Italy, and coral reefs off the east coast of Mauritius.
According to the WEF's New Nature Economy Report, more than half of the world's GDP, about US$44 trillion, relies on nature and the services it provides.
However, climate change and biodiversity loss are threatening the survival and sustainable development of humanity. A new nature economy could generate up to $10.1 trillion in annual business value and create 395 million jobs by 2030
To explore the future potential of smart nature conservation, the summit brought together TECH4ALL partners, including the Yucatan state government of Mexico, the Mexican innovation agency C Minds, IUCN China, WWF Italy, Rainforest Connection, and Shandong Yellow River Delta National Nature Reserve.
Click to watch the summit.