Wren | Tech-enabled rainforest protection

Tech-enabled rainforest protection

Peru

This project gives Indigenous Amazonians the technology, training, and support they need to protect their rainforest home.

Indigenous peoples and local communities are proven to be the rainforest's best guardians, and they manage, own, use, or occupy over a quarter of the world's land area. Mitigating the worst effects of climate change requires trusting and uplifting Indigenous knowledge on how to care for the rainforests.

Our project partner has pioneered a monitoring program that integrates satellite imagery, drone footage, and other technology into local governance and on-the-ground interventions, empowering Indigenous communities to quickly detect, report, and stop illegal deforestation.

A Peruvian monitor launches a portable drone to document the rainforest canopy from above.

How does it work?

This project prevents deforestation, protects biodiversity, promotes Indigenous land rights, and enhances community self-determination. Here's how it works:

Establish and operate technology hubs: Indigenous organizations operate regional technology hubs, running Indigenous-led training and technology camps to help communities build high-tech forest monitoring skills alongside their existing traditional ecological knowledge.
Detect deforestation with satellite data: Deforestation is detected on a rapid, near real-time basis using remote sensing data from the World Resources Institute’s Global Forest Watch and Planet Labs. This data is then analyzed by Indigenous technicians in the regional technology hubs, who distribute relevant deforestation alerts to local communities in the project area.
Use coordinates to investigate deforestation activity. Indigenous rainforest monitors investigate possible threats with drones and document any deforestation or illegal activities using specialized apps on their smartphones.
Present findings to community assemblies: The monitors share their observations with communities, which use a consensus model to decide on the appropriate response and take action based on how they want to oppose against the deforestation.
Report decisions and actions: The communities report their decisions and actions back to the regional technology hubs, which compile all the data, inform other communities of region-wide threats, and advocate with state agencies and law enforcement.
Collect, analyze, and store the data: Our project partner, Rainforest Foundation US, uses the results to determine which interventions are working and improve the impact and efficiency of the program.

Why this project?

This project protects the Amazon from an increasing array of threats, including illegal logging, mining, and illegal agriculture. It expands Indigenous-held lands by securing formal land titles to previously untitled communities and expanding existing land titles. This is the most effective model the Wren team has seen to prevent deforestation in tropical rainforests.

Indigenous forests have some of the lowest deforestation rates in the entire Amazon basin, and a study by Columbia University and Johns Hopkins University demonstrated that the community forest monitoring pioneered by this project has the potential to further reduce those deforestation rates by over 50%.

Press mentions

Where is the project located?

This project is located in the Loreto region of Northern Peru, along the Napo and Lower Amazon river corridors. This corridor extends roughly from Peru’s border with Ecuador to the triple frontier between Peru, Ecuador and Colombia.

While this project explicitly addresses territorial security among the communities along the Napo and Lower Amazon Rivers, it is also worth noting that these communities adjoin protected areas, forest reserves and/or places with Indigenous populations living in voluntary isolation. This project has the potential to increase security and decrease invasions of these adjacent areas since the project communities act as a buffer to large interior portions of Loreto’s most intact forests.

Who is behind this project?

This project is spearheaded by Rainforest Foundation US. They are a world renowned foundation and have been given 4 out of 4 stars on Charity Navigator since 2008. Additionally, they have decades of experience protecting tropical rainforest, and have been working on this technology-driven model of monitoring deforestation since 2015.

Local monitors in the Peruvian Amazon are equipped with technology and training to confront threats of illegal deforestation.

How is the money spent?

Receipts and documents

We keep a public record of all payment receipts we've received from our project partners. You can browse the receipt ledger here.

The majority of Wren funding directly helps to protect the land from deforestation. On the ground in Indigenous communities, these activities include organizing meetings to discuss threats and threat responses, and training, onboarding, and equipping new community patrollers and rainforest monitors.

At our project partner's headquarters, Wren funding goes toward activities like monitoring satellite data and verifying deforestation alerts, conducting natural resource and land-use inventories, and conducting geospatial surveys of new community titles. About one-fifth of Wren's funding is used to cover additional costs such as office rental, the process of administering grants, and general overhead.

Verification

At Wren, we believe addressing the climate crisis requires a comprehensive approach that funds a range of climate solutions. Tech-enabled rainforest protection facilitates positive, system-wide changes. This Additional contributions project complements Wren's carbon projects to ensure our subscribers can support a greater breadth of initiatives while offsetting their carbon footprint with Certified offsets.