In the context of climate change and biodiversity loss, forests worldwide are increasingly being mobilised to meet environmental targets since forests are key contributors to biodiversity, water, air and carbon cycles. To meet and verify these targets, governments, technologists, researchers, NGOs, public and private sectors, and communities are deploying digital technologies to manage, monitor, and transform forests. From LiDAR used to monitor carbon storage to digital twins to model future forest scenarios, as well as camera traps to monitor forest species and remote sensing to detect deforestation, there has been an upturn in the digitalisation of forest environments. Digital technologies such as drones, sensor networks, and machine learning are also being deployed for disaster management, for example, to prevent, detect, and extinguish forest fires.

While there has been considerable research into using and improving digital technologies in forests, the social-political impacts of smart forest technologies have been less fully explored. The Smart Forests research group has sought to contribute to this topic through literature scans, interviews, case studies, Field Schools, creative workshops, and desk-based research. We have grappled particularly with the impacts that these technologies have on communities. In the process, we have found that smart forests can alter engagements and livelihoods; technologies are often unevenly distributed across communities and exacerbate resource shortages; and smart forests can transform environmental governance and reshape power dynamics between communities, states, and technology companies. We have also found that smart forest technologies can strengthen and facilitate forest networks, including by sharing knowledge about forest practices.

Our research and outputs aim to foreground our findings on the social-political impacts of smart forests and to propose recommendations for how such projects and initiatives can be community-led, effective and just. Crucial to equitable community-led engagements is recognising that digital technologies sit alongside other more-than-digital techniques and infrastructures. These techniques could include ancestral, local, ecological or analogue forest technologies. Engaging with the knowledge produced by digital technologies in isolation would obscure other pertinent ways of knowing and inhabiting forest environments.

While these technologies often are accompanied by positive ambitions to monitor, protect, and even create environments, smart forest technologies can not only have deleterious social consequences but also harmful environmental impacts. Our literature review and interviews emphasised how these technologies consume energy, whether through data storage, the production and operation of devices, or the installation of infrastructures. The production of hardware often depends on extractive industries for component parts, such as rare earth metals. Smart forest technologies also produce electronic waste, contributing to pollution and debris across the electronics lifecycle, including by adding to the expired satellite debris orbiting the Earth. Moreover, one research interviewee questioned how unintrusive some monitoring technologies actually are in ecosystems and suggested that devices such as camera traps could impact species’ behaviour in environments. We see these topics as areas that warrant further research.

The Smart Forests research group continues to engage with and share research and outputs with the four case study communities while now beginning work on a fifth case study in the UK. We welcome engagements with our findings and recommendations within and beyond technical or academic circles. We are developing this report iteratively along with knowledge exchange workshops where we are exploring how this research could be best shared with forest communities, policymakers, industry actors, researchers, and NGOs. In addition to this report, we encourage broad engagement with our findings through the resources tagged below and through the Smart Forests website, radio, films and our interactive Smart Forests Atlas. If you would like to discuss our research further, please contact us at: info@smartforests.net.