(Clay Banks, Unsplash)
This article is brought to you thanks to the collaboration of The European Sting with the World Economic Forum.
Author: Kate Whiting, Senior Writer, Formative Content
- UK company Dendra plans to plant 500 billion trees by 2060 – using AI and drones.
- The drones can plant 120 seedpods per minute.
- The WWF estimates we’re losing 27 football fields of forest every minute due to deforestation.
A drone can plant two trees per second, according to UK tech company Dendra, which is aiming to “re-green” the planet.
Dendra estimates it would take just 400 teams of two drone operators, with 10 drones per team, to plant 10 billion trees each year – and at a much lower cost than the traditional method of planting by hand.
The target is to plant 500 billion trees by 2060, in often hard-to-reach places.
Susan Graham, CEO of Dendra Systems, says, “The challenge that we’re tackling is a complex one and working with a team of passionate engineers, plant scientists, drone operators, we came up with this idea to use automation and digital intelligence to plant billions of trees.”
How to plant seeds with drones
So, how does it work?
First, the replanting areas are identified using a combination of satellite images and drone-collected data.
Specialized planting drones take to the skies loaded with seedpods containing a germinated seed and nutrients.
Once in position, the drones use pressurized air to fire the seeds into the ground – at 120 pods per minute. The seedpods penetrate the earth and start to grow once activated by water.
A ‘step-change’
Dendra estimates its technology – combining speed and accuracy – would enable governments to restore forests 150 times faster than planting by hand, and up to 10 times cheaper.
Graham says it represents a new “step-change” in how we think about global ecosystem restoration.
“We need to use technology to scale up our restoration efforts, and the scale we’re talking about is tens of billions of trees every year.
“We’ll be able to see the ecosystems that we’ve restored from space.”
What’s the World Economic Forum doing about deforestation?
Halting deforestation is essential to avoiding the worst effects of global climate change.
The destruction of forests creates almost as much greenhouse gas emissions as global road travel, and yet it continues at an alarming rate.
In 2012, we brought together more than 150 partners working in Latin America, West Africa, Central Africa and South-East Asia – to establish the Tropical Forest Alliance 2020: a global public-private partnership to facilitate investment in systemic change.
The Alliance, made up of businesses, governments, civil society, indigenous people, communities and international organizations, helps producers, traders and buyers of commodities often blamed for causing deforestation to achieve deforestation-free supply chains.
The Commodities and Forests Agenda 2020, summarizes the areas in which the most urgent action is needed to eliminate deforestation from global agricultural supply chains.
The Tropical Forest Alliance 2020 is gaining ground on tackling deforestation linked to the production of four commodities: palm oil, beef, soy, and pulp and paper.
Get in touch to join our mission to halt to deforestation.
The WWF estimates we’re losing more than 75,000 square kilometres of forests a year, or 27 football fields every minute – including the carbon capture potential of those trees.
And people are increasingly aware of deforestation, with almost 80% of those in the UK slightly or very concerned about it.
“There’s a saying that goes that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, and the second best time is today,” says Graham.
“We have this opportunity now, and we need to act today.”
[…] were YouTube celebrities and Elon Musk, among pop culture icons, as well as tech companies and drone start-ups. But scientists urged caution, noting that tree-planting programs must be carefully conceived and […]