‘Smart’ forest technologies have begun to proliferate, emerging in the larger context of climate technologies, nature technologies and digital ecosystems. Yet, unlike the more familiar term, ‘smart cities’, whereby digital solutions are employed to enhance or replace traditional urban networks and services, the concept of ‘smart forests’ is still taking shape.

Crossing policy, industry, public and academic spaces, the terms ‘smart’ and ‘forest’ can be fluid, plural, and multivalent. During our research, we embraced this plurality by following terms through their use and the practices they activate rather than offering singular definitions. By smart forests, we refer broadly to the numerous digital technologies and infrastructures that are now managing, monitoring, networking, and remaking forests as they attempt to optimise forests for resources, detect environmental change, and intervene in sites of forest loss. 

Smart forests can be found in locations worldwide, spanning remote and urban areas. However, despite the growing presence of smart forest technologies, there has been a comparative lack of engagement with the social-political implications of these devices. Far from being neutral operators in environmental spaces, these technologies can have far-reaching social-political impacts. Our central questions attend to these impacts by asking:

Our research with communities asks how smart forest technologies are impacting community dynamics, forest engagements and livelihoods, and interactions with state actors and industries. 

As with the terms ‘smart’ and ‘forest’, we engage with broad notions of community. While communities can be local and bounded in terms of space and place, they can also be digital, geographically dispersed and self-selecting. Communities can cross scales of governance or incorporate more-than-human entities. Communities can be created through participatory projects or in order to deploy technologies. Communities can be momentary, episodic or enduring.

This interim report seeks to enable communities, publics, policymakers, industries and NGOs to better understand these social-political impacts as the users, regulators, funders and developers of smart forest technologies. After familiarising readers with how forests are becoming digital environments, we foreground how diverse communities are engaging with and are impacted by forest technologies and changing governance practices. Through this research, we also consider how digital technologies are just one type of technology that has been or could be mobilised in forest environments, since ancestral, analogue and ecological technologies are as likely to be used in forests. This interim report documents and analyses how smart forest technologies are deployed in four case study locations across Chile, India, Indonesia and the Netherlands. We are publishing this material in interim form to generate conversations across communities, policymakers, technologists, and researchers, which will inform the final version of the report. The final report will also incorporate our fifth case study on community-led technologies and landscape regeneration in the UK. 

The last two decades have seen an upturn in policy interventions to meet environmental targets through forest management and mass reforestation. As crucial contributors to biodiversity, water, air and carbon cycles, forests are being mobilised as key ecosystems for environmental action. While targets have slipped in this period, with none of the Aichi Targets (2011-2020) fully achieved at a global level and a failure to meet the initial targets of the New York Declaration on Forests (2014), international policy interventions and pledges persist. In 2019, proposals emerged to restore 350 million hectares of degraded lands as part of the UN decade on ecosystem restoration; and in 2021 agreements to stop illegal deforestation by 2030 were incorporated into the Glasgow Declaration on Forests (COP26), endorsing the New York Declaration on Forests.

To meet and validate environmental targets such as these, digital technologies that monitor and manage forests are increasingly deployed by actors across public and private sectors. Technology companies and researchers are focusing on developing digital solutions to environmental problems, including ‘AI for Earth’ remote-sensing and data collection or ‘Internet of Trees’ developments for forest management through sensors. Digital technologies can track logging activities, optimise resource use, map urban forest networks, monitor carbon capture, and assess forest health and disease. Forest digital twins, or virtual representations of physical forest systems, are being developed to predict changes in forest structure and model future scenarios. The rise in forest fires across the globe has also prompted the deployment of wireless sensor networks, drones, and machine learning to detect and extinguish fires as they occur in real-time.   

Our intention in this research has been neither simply to advocate for nor only to critique smart forests. Instead, we outline how smart forests are being constituted to make more or less liveable worlds, and through what means. The primary purpose of this report is to document and propose strategies to ensure diverse community-led approaches to forest technologies can be effectively designed, implemented and supported. In the following sections, we highlight our central questions and findings, situate our contribution in relation to parallel research and policy, and then walk through the research we undertook, including recounting four stories from forest case studies in India, Chile, Indonesia, and the Netherlands. Based on these engagements with forest communities, residents and workers, we highlight how the social-political impacts of forest technologies could be addressed and consider how communities might work with these technologies to create thriving and just forest environments.