On the 50th anniversary of World Environment Day, Huawei and IUCN highlighted smart solutions to support effective and fair management and governance of protected and conserved areas, and the growing importance of technology in monitoring threatened species and protecting their natural habitats.
Huawei and IUCN outlined a vision for protected and conserved areas, to harness digital technology to help achieve global biodiversity targets. At the summit, the White Paper on Smart Protected Areasjointly developed by Huawei, IUCN (The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN China) and the China Academy of Forestry, to share the blueprint for building smart protected areas, based on the experience of protected areas from China.
The key to wildlife protection is understanding the distribution, behaviors, and seasonal trends of species, and how human activities can affect their patterns. This requires a large amount of data, which can be difficult to obtain given the remote and hard-to-reach areas, often exacerbated by extreme weather.
Early research and data collection efforts relied on scientists going into the field to set up camera traps to capture images. These cameras needed maintenance, their batteries replaced and their memory cards replaced and analyzed, time- and labor-intensive processes that often resulted in data and images that were several months old.
Huawei and IUCN outlined a vision for protected and conserved areas, to harness digital technology to help achieve global biodiversity targets
The implementation of next-generation digital technologies such as cloud computing, IoT, mobile Internet, big data, and AI enable real-time data acquisition and interaction. This is key to improving smart detection, analysis and management of species protection and area-based conservation efforts, making them more effective and therefore better at conserving nature.
Since 2019, Huawei has worked together with more than 30 global partners, including IUCN, to apply digital technologies to achieve effective conservation and restoration results in 46 protected and conserved areas around the world, from rainforests to China’s Hainan, home of the rarest gibbon in the world, until wetlands, oasis in Italy and coral reefs off the east coast of Mauricio.
For example, under Tech4Nature at Mexicowhere Huawei partners with IUCN, C-Minds, Polytechnic University of Yucatan, the Rainforest Connection and the local Dzilam community, has collected more than 30,000 photos, 550,000 audio recordings and numerous video clips of wild animals. An algorithm was developed and trained to help identify the different species, especially the jaguar, and to date, the team has identified 119 species, including 5 individual jaguars.
“We have gained a lot in the past three years of cooperation, during which time Huawei has worked with us to demonstrate the responsible use of new technologies in the protection of nature. IUCN looks forward to a long-term collaboration with Huawei as a technology leader to help achieve global goals such as the goal of conserving at least 30% of Earth’s land and water by 2030,” said Dr. Grethel AguilarIUCN Deputy Director General.
The key to wildlife protection is understanding the distribution, behaviors, seasonal trends of species, and how human activities can affect their patterns.
The main objective of White Paper on Smart Protected Areas is to carry out the effective conservation of protected areas and the sustainable management of natural resources. Based on this objective, the white paper identifies seven main scenarios, which include ecological protection and restoration, resource management, and scientific research, among others.
In these identified scenarios, four key capabilities must be implemented, including comprehensive and multidimensional ecological sensing, integrated multi-network communications that can adapt to complex terrain, intelligent analytics that can process massive amounts of data from multiple sources, and the ability to apply the analytical results to the operations and management of protected areas.
This plan proposes a comprehensive solution architecture for smart protected areas based on the latest developments in digital technology.
“Biodiversity loss and climate change are two interrelated global environmental crises that require coordinated responses. While nature protection, science and technology can also help thousands of industries with green development and better cope with climate change,” said Tao Jingwen, director of Huawei’s board of directors and chairman of the Huawei Development Committee. Corporate Sustainable Development (CSD).
Peng Song, Senior Vice President and Chairman of Huawei’s ICT Strategy & Marketing Department, said: “Earth is our only home. Digital technologies can help protect nature reserves more effectively and promote sustainable management of natural resources. Our original intention is to summarize improving the practice of science and technology to help protect nature and to work with partners to promote the smart construction of more nature reserves.”
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According to him New Nature Economy Report of the WEF, more than half of world GDP, around 44 trillion US dollarsIt depends on the nature and the services it provides. However, climate change and the loss of biodiversity threaten the survival and sustainable development of humanity. A new natural economy could generate up to 10.1 trillion dollars 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 state government of Yucatan in Mexico the Mexican innovation agency C Minds, IUCN China, WWF Italy, Rainforest Connection and the Shandong Yellow River Delta National Nature Reserve.
