The scientists collaborated with 76 Indigenous communities, 36 of which participated in using these alerts to watch over the forest. Three people from each of the latter communities received training to use an early-alert system on a smartphone app and to patrol forests and document damage.
Over the next two years these trained participants were paid to work as forest monitors and received monthly alerts via the app when satellite data indicated local forest losses. Monitors investigated alerts and patrolled for deforestation in other areas. They reported confirmed losses back to their communities, which decided whether to deal with the culprits on their own or inform state authorities.
The researchers analyzed the same forest-loss satellite data from the given time period in all 76 communities. They found the early-alert program reduced forest loss by 8.4 hectares in the first year—a 52 percent reduction compared with the average loss in the control communities, says study co-author Tara Slough, a political economist at New York University. “This reduction in deforestation was concentrated in communities facing the largest threat” of forest loss, she adds. “If one were to continue the program, targeting it to the communities facing the biggest threats should avert the most tree-cover loss.”
Results for the monitoring program were less striking in its second year, when forest loss was reduced by only 3.3 hectares compared with that in control communities. The researchers suggest a Peruvian government campaign against coca cultivation that year may have discouraged deforestation in both experimental and control communities’ territories, shrinking differences between the two groups in the pilot program.
