Social Innovation in protecting our green wealth

All over the world, Hitachi Social Innovation Business is helping societies protect their green wealth and live better through innovative and low carbon-footprint advanced IoT Technology. Realizing that our environment is key to healthy living Hitachi Social Innovation is playing a critical role in protecting our lifeline, the nature, by leveraging Hitachi's technological leadership.

Can technology save our precious trees from the clutches of the poachers and before they disappear from the face of the earth? Is the solution scalable to become a Social Innovation? Let's delve into the possibility with Hitachi advanced IoT based technology.

For many years India's high-value trees are being illegally cut by poachers from vast and dense forests protected by forests guards, farms that have due license to grow them and even from secured government facilities. The poachers take advantage of the insurmountable practical difficulties of monitoring the large spaces.

The incident of a 20-foot-tall sandalwood tree chopped off by thieves inside the secured Institute of Wood Science and Technology campus (IWST) in 2015 ¹ highlight the critical state of affairs. Little and at times delayed information on the area or which tree the poachers are trying to cut prevents authorities from taking timely action to save the precious trees and apprehend the culprits.

Technology comes to rescue

Through Collaborative co-creation, Hitachi and IWST, Bengaluru, (an institute under the ministry of forests) devised have come together to collaborate and device a smart technological intervention that will help preserve the invaluable vegetation as well as assist in catching the dangerous culprits at the right moment.

The innovation is a small IoT based water and weather resistant device that needs to be secured to a tree. Once safely positioned, the moment that tree is in the danger of being uprooted or chopped by poachers, the device sends an alert to the user through cloud. This ensures quick response by the officials to prevent the loss to the forest and farmers who are growing the high value trees. The poachers can be tackled efficiently and timely making them vary of such acts in the future.

Hitachi through its CSR initiative and Social Innovation in India is leveraging its IoT based technology to save precious trees by deploying its Hitachi Anomaly Detection to Prediction and Prescription (HAD2P) technology to monitor and detect illegal cutting and movement of high-value trees. This is a prototype project that is being developed to create a sustainable solution to monitor and standardize e-protection of trees high in demand.

Social Innovation that protects green fortune

The innovation has a wide environmental and societal impact that will lead to Social Innovation in protection of high-value trees and large-scale ecological balance by acting as deterrent to illegal and rampant cutting. By protecting our invaluable green wealth, the technological intervention will lead to healthier societies and a sustainable future or posterity.

In the years to come, leveraging the inherent advantages of portability and easy installation, the Iot based technology can extend to location-tagging of assets cut across regions and locations. This will enable real time tracking through GPS and Google maps of invaluable resources- safeguarding the interests of the individuals and the society as a whole-A step towards a safer world.

Source:
1 - TOI - 11/10/17