Smart innovation for fighting forest fires
Credit: Heidi Buck
One small group of young 10- to 12-year-old students are proving that the next generation of sustainable thinkers are capable of some very savvy innovation.
Students from a school in Meadow Vista, California - a small town nestled in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains - identified a significant problem in their area: forest fires. Recognizing that repeated forest fires are not only destructive and expensive for their community, but also that they release a massive amount of carbon emissions into the atmosphere, they devised an early warning system that takes an already used idea - networked cameras monitoring forests - and adds a social networking component that lets anyone act as a citizen fire-watcher.
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The system is based on mounting solar powered CCTV cameras to treetops and poles, which sends images and video back to a central computer that can be monitored for signs of forest fire. The network of live cameras enables citizen fire-watchers to monitor the areas. When a fire is spotted, they can quickly notify firefighters and potentially avoid extensive damage and carbon emissions from out-of-control forest fires. Firefighters can also monitor the fire with the system, allowing them to to better deploy resources and protect residents.
What is extraordinary about these kids is that they have not only come up with this solution for their community, but they're taking it international. Calling their group the Forest Guard, they beat over 140,000 other entrants in Children's Climate Call, a global innovation competition on climate change. They also earned the honor of going to Bright Green in Copenhagen last December to present the Forest Guard proof of concept to some of the world's leading authorities on climate change.
world's leading authorities on climate change. The attention their project has received has gone a long way in moving it forward. Sony Eco was a sponsor in the Children's Climate Call competition, and the company was so impressed with the idea that they worked with Forest Guard to produce prototypes for a pilot program. As of last December, they saw those prototypes deployed in their local area, in Tahoe City, California.
The Sony designs and software for the Forest Guard early warning detection concept will be released into the public domain and a white paper will also be made available. This means that any scientists, governments and NGOs working to combat wildfires globally will have access to the information they need to create one of these systems for themselves.
The team notes that "the carbon dioxide emitted during these fires can equal that produced by several million cars on the road in a year and CO2 emissions by forest fires are expected to increase by [possibly as much as] 50% by 2050."
There is no doubt that as fire season hits this year in California, the Forest Guard's system will be a valuable resource.
