Illegal logging, according to Interpol, makes up about 50 to 90 percent of the logging in the rainforest worldwide. It's true that deforestation alone counts for more carbon emissions than all transportation, all the cars, trucks, trains, boats, planes combined.

In the summer of 2011, I visited the forests of Borneo, the rainforest of Borneo, for the very first time. As you can imagine, it was the overwhelming sound that really struck me the most. But there were some things that actually stuck out from this cacophony. This is a hornbill. This is a cicada. And, uh... This is a family of gibbons. They're singing to each other over a great distance. This was not something we were aware of. But in the background of this sound, this overwhelming cacophony, is the sound of chainsaws. In fact, if you turn down the sound of the forest, there was actually a chainsaw noise behind that, the entire time.

It's very, very hard to know where illegal logging is taking place, even over a short distance of the forest, because it's such a loud place and because it's such a dense place that you can't move through so easily. I think, you... you have to realize that it's hard for people in the field. There's lot of sincere people out there who are trying to fight deforestation but it's not easy to know where it's happening at all times. And having real time knowledge of this is pretty important.

So, here's this idea, right. The moment that a chainsaw goes off in the forest, a computer, a device is able to pick up the sound, pick it out of the rainforest, chainsaws, and alert the local authorities who can show up in real time and halt the loggers. The most important part of the equation are the people. The people who can actually show up and respond, who've taken the risk of being there to actually stop it. But the amazing thing is that there's sometimes pretty good connectivity. There's cell phone service out in the middle of the forest, particularly on the periphery. Um, out there there's no electricity, no running water, no roads for hundreds of miles, in some cases. But they're all on their cell phones. People in the villages were surfing Facebook. They're on the web. They charge their phones on a generator at night, and then they do the same thing the next day. And so there's pretty good cell phone service. But you need a device, right? And so we're talking about cell phones. What can cell phones do? I mean, what can't cell phones do these days, right?

So, cell phones are fantastic little computers. They're everywhere. We probably all have them in our pockets right now. And they're a fantastic development platform. There's hundreds of millions of developers who are willing to use it. To protect it from, from... from the elements of the rainforest, we put it in a box. There's a powerful microphone on it. You do have to put some solar panels on it to make sure it can stay powered, which is actually the hardest part because under a tree canopy it is pretty dark. This is actually what it looks like all put together. This is the prototype. There's a phone inside that box. And you're able to listen to the sounds of the forest. This is me, sort of, putting it all together, just to show you guys how simple it really actually can be. But you have to test it in the field. So, we took it back to Indonesia. This time on the island of Sumatra. And, somewhat to our surprise, on the second day we were able to pick up sounds of chainsaws and send a real time alert to myself and to the rangers that were there. We took off to go... to go see where this was. This is the moment where we've just sort of walked through the forest and we're not sure if this has been the best idea altogether. There's supposed to be loggers on the other side and so we're kinda regretting this... “Oh, God, he's moving. I gotta go, I gotta follow him.” Okay, so we get over... We get over the hill. And on the other side, we managed to catch some loggers in the act. And our partners there talked them down. Nobody had to be arrested. They actually were acquaintances of the people that run the reserve. And although we didn't know that this was on there... So, they were able to leverage this, these partners. They're so fantastic. They were able to leverage this to diffuse the situation and according to them, the loggers have not been back to that area since. So, as far as they're concerned, this was very effective.

But the question is how do we pick it out? Look, it needs to be automatic. There's... Sometimes people think that it's about, perhaps, people listening on the phone to the forest and looking for the sounds of chainsaws. It's not really feasible to expect people to pick the sounds out, even. But computers are really, really good at it. On the top you see data from Sumatra. The exact test. This is the event that we were able to respond to. This is almost a kilometer away from where the device is throughout the cacophony of the forest. But there's these peaks, these four little bumps and those represent these... The signal of the chainsaw, which really does not belong in the forest. This is not cutting edge science, this is really... old school data analysis. And you can see it's... this is much closer than one kilometer. But you can see these peaks that show up and even as the peaks move around back and forth, they are always the same distance away. That's something that a computer can pick out pretty easily. Based on this, if you can pick up the sounds of chainsaws at one kilometer away, then you can perhaps set them up around the periphery of a reserve and protect up to two kilometers inward. Especially because the periphery of the reserve is the most likely to have cell phone service. We thought this is pretty exciting so we shared the news with the world. And people came, people came to us and said “Hey, we can use this elsewhere.”

The first one... The first one was our partner: Zoological Society of London, who invited us to Africa to do it. And they had an even better idea than picking up chainsaws. They said to us, “Look, there's this FSC concession here. There's about two-thirds of it in the south that is under threat from illegal logging and poaching but there's one access road. There's just one road that people use to get in and out. So, you could blanket the entire surface in cell phones which doesn't seem very feasible. Or you could just set them up along this road and if only your system could detect vehicles, then you could know the moment that loggers come in and out or poachers go in and out.” All of it goes through this one gate. This is in Cameroon. And working with an FSC certified company that's responsible for protecting this area as part of their certification. These are the guys that man the gate. And you can see behind them, all of these animals that are there. These animals that they are responsible for protecting including elephants, chimpanzees and gorillas. But it was known that there was a decent amount of illegal logging taking place there. So, we set up our system along the road and trained it to pick out the sounds of motorcycles. And you can see the same sort of system applies with these peaks and being able to pick them out.

Moving from Africa to the Amazon. Now, on the outskirts of the Amazon you have this ocean of deforestation with these little islands of forest. What's going on with that? Well, those are indigenous reserves. They are not necessarily protected areas in the traditional sense. They're lands that have been... have been maintained by the indigenous people and are recognized by the government. And, somehow, that seemed to work. So, you move down here, this is the Tembé Reserve. The area to the south is a different tribe. And there's about 1500 of them left. Most of their villages are in the north and the south edge. This was pristine, virgin rainforest just a few decades ago. But the middle area is under constant threat from illegal logging. Sometimes, ten logging trucks at a time are settling and also drug plantations are there as well. So, we spoke through our partners to the Tembé and they said this... this vigilance program, this program of driving people out of their land could use a technological edge. These are the Tembé. They believe that they are currently on their last stand for the survival of their entire race. And it is, sort of, you know, the way forward or annihilation. Fortunately for that, they are well organized as of late. They are well armed and they are very motivated to fight back against the drug smugglers and illegal loggers. So, we were working with the chiefs in the village in the north and the south, because, again, it's always about using what's already there. In the case of Africa, there was a cell-tower right smack dab next to the reserve. But in Brazil, we don't have that. There is infrastructure, there's cell phone towers... This is huge, this is a 6,000 square kilometer reserve. And so these cell phone, sort of, points of access that you see here, are actually up to 50-60 kilometers away from the areas that are most under threat which made this next part pretty important. So, being up in the trees is important because it allowed us to do things like this. Just sitting up here in the tree while it rains away. I'm about 120 feet up. But, pretty amazing thing is that... ...if you look at the signal up there... Well, now it's not very good. Look at the signal up there, we got cell phone service. Thanks to this huge... ...parabolic antenna that we got, which is picking up a signal from about 30 kilometers away here in Brazil, in the Tembé territory. Okay, so, they don't all need those antennas. But, that one actually was able to pick up a signal from 30 kilometers away. We were able to repeat the same experiment at 50 kilometers, meaning that we can really push the limits of where this system is able to potentially work. I just got back here this weekend from the Tembé Reserve and one week ago, this last Friday, we became aware that there were vehicles moving through one of the areas where we set up a device. It was some of the illegal settlers who came back. They noticed that we'd been there. They burned down one of the Tembé bridges. And so this is from less than a week ago, in Brazil. So, this fight is just beginning but it's clear that already we've been able to lend a hand to that. Thanks.