Indigenous Tribe at Panama Combat Deforestation with Drone: UN

Bogota: Panama, house of seven prominent indigenous tribes that occupies 13 percent of the country, is using drones to monitor deforestation. A report from the United Nations has asserted that the ethnic tribes have noted that their lands are losing thousands of hectares of greens every year, which was once used to be world’s most bio-diverse rainforest. There rainforests, being home to most of the ethnic tribes, have inaugurated most problems in livelihood as they survive upon the forests for living.

Following the issues of deforestation and the actions of the indigenous tribes, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization stated: “The main objective of monitoring with drones is to identify changes in specific points of the forest cover. The monitoring is carried out in areas under deforestation and degradation pressure, which are only observable with high resolution spatial images.”

Noting the number of indigenous people in Panama and their dependence on tribal lands, known as Comarcas, which occupies about 13 percent of Panama’s 4 million populations, it was said that drones are helping them out to know the forests’ characteristic and resources available in them. A leader of the Ngabe-Buglé tribe, Eliseo Quintero, said that drones and other technical tools help them to monitor their ancestral lands, first used in 2015 only.

A project by the U.N’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), termed as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation Programme (UN-REDD) that used seven indigenous tribes in Panama and trained them to use drones, download and save images and collect data. UN said that the drones provided to the tribes are suitable to use although the year and is effective to monitor forest fires, harvesting crops and find out water sources. Another part of the project by UN to provide drones to the tribes was to map deforestation that is a primary source of carbon emission in the country.

According to the national association for the conservation of nature, a non-profit organization, working with the deforestation issue in panama for years, said that Panama is losing as many as 20,000 hectares of forests each year.