Restoration Land Manager

1. What problem are you committed to solving? 

The disconnect between global knowledge, techniques, marketplaces, and local stakeholders making land use decisions.

2. What solution are you proposing? 

An interactive platform enabling smallholder farmers and larger-scale landowners to generate income by restoring and protecting ecosystem services.

The platform would provide a real-time view of each participating farm and the condition of the land as part of an end-to-end management regime for transitioning to sustainable land use and regenerative agricultural practices. 

3. How could your solution positively change lives if it was scaled globally?

Smallholder farmers transitioning to sustainable land use and regenerative agricultural practices would benefit themselves, their communities, and the surrounding landscapes in a multitude of ways -- more income, better yields, enhanced ecosystem services and resilience, greater independence, and enhanced knowledge. 

Smallholder farmers lack the incentives and the tools to participate in land restoration. Limited also by access to knowledge and marketplaces, they often resort to logging and practices that degrade the land, leaving them vulnerable to hardships. Unclear ownership rights hinder landowners’ ability to collect payments for switching to more sustainable practices that provide ecosystem services. 

Farmers also struggle to operate sustainably, often lacking the ability to collect, integrate, analyze, and visualize data about their land, the local climate, economic returns, and other important factors. Collecting data is labor-intensive, often done by hand, often expensive, and usually vulnerable to errors and discrepancies. Even if data are collected, their analysis and integration is hampered. The problems described above as well as the challenges presented by bridging the gap between global and regional models prevent successful upscaling of restoration.

In sum, too many barriers exist to implement systems providing payment for ecosystem services and verifying sustainable and regenerative agricultural practices through monitoring. 

An interactive platform will provide a real-time view of each participating farm and the condition of the land as part of an end-to-end management regime for transitioning to sustainable land use and regenerative agricultural practices. 

The platform will allow rural stakeholders: 

• to gather, integrate, analyze and visualize local data via a simple smartphone app; 

• to integrate their local data with broader datasets of remote sensing, satellite data, and other existing ecological and agricultural data tools; 

• to use the App to visualize historic and future changes in land use and their associated incomes; 

• to monitor and verify the restoration of ecosystem services that benefit the surrounding community; 

• to apply advanced analytics and machine-learning algorithms to adapt sustainable land use and regenerative agricultural practices to local conditions; 

• to manage a payments program that equips farmers and other stakeholders with the knowledge, tools, and other resources to protect and restore ecosystem services while providing financial compensation for doing so;  

• to connect farmers to marketplaces that value land restoration and its associated climate benefits

Smallholder farmers transitioning to sustainable land use and regenerative agricultural practices would benefit themselves, their communities, and the surrounding landscapes in a multitude of ways. 

Farmers would supplement their income by monetizing the ecosystem services their lands provide to the surrounding community. They also would gain greater resilience through improved yields, greater resistance to pests, and better protection from erosion, floods, droughts, and other disruptions. 

More importantly, farmers would be empowered to take these actions for and by themselves, rather than relying on international development programs, NGOs, and other external and ephemeral sources of support. 

Farmers and their communities also would benefit from the associated environmental benefits of sustainable land use and regenerative agricultural practices, particularly cleaner air and water, richer soils, and greater biodiversity. Globally, a transition to sustainable land use and regenerative agricultural practices has the potential to turn smallholder farming from a net source to a net sink of carbon dioxide emissions, helping to ward off climate change. 

Finally, farmers would benefit from gaining access to a wider marketplace through the App that links responsible producers (with proven with proven and quantified carbon benefits) to buyers.

The problem we have identified is global in scale and sits at the nexus of biodiversity loss and climate change. Smallholder farmers resorting to “slash and burn” agriculture are driven by strong economic pressures. They lack economic choices. Upscaling requires an easy to implement technological solution. 

Our solution harnesses the power of data technologies and seeks to leverage the global proliferation of smartphones and internet connectivity. It is focused on well-established methods for sustainable land use and regenerative agriculture and is grounded in a basic financial empowerment model that can be measured, monitored, and verified. 

We have developed a basic prototype and our park rangers and field staff are using it for land management in 16 protected reserves in Ecuador. Our development team is in the process of adding new features geared specifically for broader sustainable land use and regenerative agriculture practices, which is expected to occur over the next three or four months.  

In order to test and gather feedback, we will deploy the prototype in pilot projects in two to three distinct rural communities in Ecuador -- Reserva Jama Coaque, Reserva Municipal Palanda, and potentially a third location in either the Chocó or the Eastern Andes. These pilots will allow us to troubleshoot any problems, gauge the adoption rate by communities, and assess its performance across different socio-economic contexts.  

While in theory there are many similar applications that claim to be easy to use and have A.I. models and remote sensing technology to provide information, in practice, having experimented with several existing applications, they do not deliver what they promise to offer. Both technical and practical issues present barriers, particularly for people with limited technical or GIS knowledge.

The biggest hurdle to scaling up restoration is connecting the ground level practitioners to the theoretical science and vice versa. Existing carbon prediction models require ground data to be accurate and remote sensing and satellite data are still coarse and lack details required for accurate monitoring and verification. This app is the bridge connecting on the ground practitioners to the science and vice versa.

It is still cumbersome and time consuming to make ground data collection easy, cheap and accessible to all. Our app is currently used and built for the park rangers of our wide and diverse reserve network. As such, it is designed from scratch to account for practical hurdles (low literacy, limited internet, no or little knowledge of ecology, restoration or agroforestry practices) and aimed at delivering the necessary support in an intuitive manner. 

The innovative and new approach resides in integrating global datasets into local decision making and in the simplicity of the user experience. Bridging the technological and knowledge gaps between global models and local stakeholders empowers rural communities and eliminates the most significant hurdles for upscaling restoration efforts.

Current number of people being served: 40

Number of people being served in one year: 240

Number of people being served in five years: 50,000

The Restoration Land Manager, by its very design, allows real-time insights into its operation and effectiveness. We will gather and analyze its data and metadata to determine whether its intended benefits are reaching its intended beneficiaries -- and to what degree and extent. 

In particular, Restoration Land Manager would provide data to inform indicators on how each acre of reforested land can boost local income, produce food, restore biodiversity, and remove CO2 from the atmosphere -- all yoked to a payment for ecosystem services system whose qualifying metrics also will double as indicators. 

For example, for each acre that is reforested with agroforestry we are  reporting on the following measurable indicators per acre: 

• number of trees planted (goal = minimum 300)

• Increase of income per farmer per acre (currently +300%)

• Tonnes of carbon sequestered per acre (currently 78 tonnes CO2)

More broadly, we will build a dashboard featuring the UN Sustainable Development Goals and, to the extent applicable, track and report on the progress of the Restoration Land Manager based on the progress it makes toward those goals. 

We think the Restoration Land Manager serves the following SDGs: 

No Poverty

Zero Hunger

Good Health and Well Being

Gender Balance

Clean Water and Sanitation

Decent Work and Economic Growth

Reduced Inequalities

Stable Cities and Communities

Responsible Consumption and Production

Climate Action

Life on Land

Our team represents the work of four organizations. Three are non-profit organizations dedicated to biodiversity conservation and climate mitigation: Third Millennium Alliance, Fundación Jocotoco, and Lookfar Conservation, one is a company, Link Design, Ecuador. Link Design creates distributed and integrated Web-based applications for large businesses, and employs AI and machine learning to improve administrative and management tasks.

The team is an interdisciplinary task force comprising a variety of expertise and experiences, free to draw on their broader networks to assist as needed.

All organizations are actively providing data to the Restor.eco platform by the Crowther Lab of ETH Zurich.

four people part-time on design & architecture, combining scientists, conservationists, technology experts and fundraisers.

two people on App development, integrating it into existing modules.

three people on applying the App in Ecuador. Coordinators working with communities using the App and adapting it to feedback.

two people to integrate global datasets. 

As previously discussed, our team blends deep technology experience and know-how, with a longstanding presence in several smallholder farmer communities in highly biodiverse and highly imperiled regions of Ecuador, particularly the Ecuadorian Chocó. 

Jerry Toth of Third Millennium Alliance has been living and working in Ecuador since the early 2000s. He started the Jama-Coaque Reserve, working directly with smallholder farmers to acquire small plots of land and restore and connect these plots to surviving fragments of forest. As part of this work, Jerry and his team developed close relationships with neighboring farmers, sharing ideas, knowledge, equipment, and foodstuffs on a regular basis. Jerry himself practices regenerative agriculture within the reserve, growing cacao. 

Antonio Paez of Fundación Jocotoco is a multi-talented technology expert who developed an early prototype of what would become the Restoration Land Manager for use by Jocotoco's park guards and field staff across the network of protected reserves in Ecuador Jocotoco has developed and maintained since its founding more than 20 years ago. 

Marlies Quirino of Lookfar Conservation brings a diverse background in law, business, finance, marketing, and conservation to the project team, helping to position the Restoration Land Manager for scale and long-term success. She also draws on Lookfar's longstanding partnerships with scientific and data technology initiatives at Resource Watch, a project of the World Resources Institute, the Crowther Lab at ETH Zurich, and Restor, a data tech restoration platform spun out of the Crowther Lab's cutting edge scientific research on restoration practices. 

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are at the heart of our enterprise. Our team includes individuals from the United States, Europe, and Ecuador, involving gender balance, different ethnic, racial, and socio-economic backgrounds, and progressive organizational policies and practices for diversity, equity, and inclusion to guide our work.

Jocotoco has strongly increased the proportion of women in its workforce and senior management. Currently, three out of the four top positions within its organization are held by women. Jocotoco's core values are: We believe in people: it is the people who inspire and who achieve conservation successes. We strive to provide the opportunities for personal growth to all staff, contractors, and volunteers. 

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are important drivers for the conservation enterprises that we have been doing for more than 20 years. Through the precursor of the Restoration Land Manager App, we have been able to increase equity, inclusion, and diversity in decision making, as critical data are available and transparent to all within Jocotoco.

We are applying to Solve because we were suitably impressed with Solve's mission and work and felt it would benefit the Restoration Land Manager to be affiliated with such a visionary and progressive organization. 

In particular, we feel that affiliating the Restoration Land Manager with Solve would serve as a kind of validation of its underlying technology, social and environmental mission, and future funding prospects. 

We also believe it would help skeptics among prospective partners and even future smallholder farmer communities to overcome doubts or other misgivings about the ethnical nature and practical benefits of the platform, particularly given the need to share (and protect) data. 

We are an enterprising and open-minded group and would welcome the opportunity to learn from experts outside our regular networks. 

As previously discussed, we feel the strength of Restoration Land Manager is that it draws on existing technologies. The point is to integrate normally disparate systems -- not to build something entirely new. As such, while we would always welcome insights into the technologies used, we think the reliance on existing systems will serve us well in our work. 

We harbor significant ambitions for the deployment of Restoration Land Manager and, as is often the case with data platforms, the broader the uptake, the greater the overall benefits generated for smallholder farmers and the environment alike. As such, attracting positive attention in a way that helps us build trust outside our normal networks would be extremely helpful to our longer term ambitions around scale. 

Finally, as a consortium of relatively small nonprofit organizations, we are accustomed to doing a lot with meager financial resources. But in this case, given the importance of growing the platform, we are seeking significant financial commitments to ensure we have the means to maintain Restoration Land Manager as it grows. 

We would be open to any partnership we think best serves our social and environmental mission, and we would evaluate any such partnership on a case-by-case basis. 

Please see submission materials, which closely track the characteristics and focus of the ServiceNow Prize.

Please see submission materials, which closely track the characteristics and focus of the AI for Humanity Prize.

Please see submission materials, which closely track the characteristics and focus of the GSR Prize.