Some people just have a knack for helping other people. Irina Fedorenko has done that - and gained worldwide recognition as well as awards for her work. Now, she has turned her hand to helping the planet too, by helping to conserve and replace forest cover in remote and hard to access areas. By Jeremy Torr.

Oxford, UK. November 2019. Irina Fedorenko is a keen environmentalist from Vladivostok, in the far, cold edges of Russia. She gained a scholarship and a PhD in Geography and the Environment from Oxford, after starting up a local environmental education NGO in Russia that reached more than 5,000 people. For this she was awarded as the WHO Best European Youth Initiative in 2010. As if that wasn’t enough, she went on to co-found a social enterprise, BubbleNut Wash, that makes sustainable laundry detergent while providing livelihood to rural Indian farmers. But after finishing her PhD, Irina decided to concentrate on an area close to her heart, reforestation and large-scale ecosystem restoration projects. As part of that, she was convinced that technology could help restore degraded environments; in particular, the use of drones.

“Every year we lose more than 7 million hectares of (forested or grassed) land,”she explains. “And while there has been a lot of innovation and progress in industrial deforestation, that hasn't been any innovation in tree planting since the Iron Age. Since the invention of the shovel.”

She points out that although governments, civil society, businesses, and people have all pledged to restore millions of acres of land, using current state of the art technology that could take up to 200 years. “And we don't have that time,” she asserts.

“While community based tree planting projects are a very important piece of the puzzle, they are still just a piece of the puzzle. We want to introduce technology that can scale up ecosystem restoration dramatically – using drones.”

Fedorenko’s unique research and initiatives came to the attention of the World Economic Forum organisers. As a result she was invited to speak at the Davos Summit in 2019 – to the cream of the world’s top financial players.

“Being in Davos was like being in the centre of the world for a week with all the global leaders, excitement and innovation,” she says. “But also sadly, (we were) surrounded by unbelievable ignorance regarding pressing challenges such as climate change. So we used this opportunity to remind (global industry leaders) of the urgency and vitality of investing in young people who can together work towards a more tolerant, understanding and sustainable world.”

And although the Davos visit was a disappointment in some ways, it gave her the opportunity to spread the word about her new company, BioCarbon Engineering.

Fedorenko’s unique idea was to use programmed drones to first survey sites for a suitable seeding and layout so that tree regrowth could be maximised based on soil, topography, access and viability. The second new approach was, instead of using humans or land-based machinery to laboriously plant each seedling or seed on an individual basis, to use drones for the seeding and planting.

“First, we (at BioCarbon Engineering) use the mapping drone to get analysis of the landscape and ecosystem that's there, using different sensors … which inform us about ecosystem health, not just landscape. Then the planting pattern is developed, and it's uploaded into the planting drone,” she explains.

The planting drone is programmed to fly an autonomous course two metres off the ground, and fire out bursts of seed in pre-calculated amounts for best germination.

“In some environments, spreading is sufficient,” says Fedorenko. “But in some environments seed boats are the best technology. Here, the drone is loaded with seed pods containing a germinated seed, nutrients and a custom made casing which is fired into the ground. For this particular environment, it enables healthy trees to grow and to promote forest uptake.”

Then, once the forest has grown, the BioCarbon Engineering team can come back with their mapping drone and monitor the area to check for disease, to see whether replanting or extra planting is needed, and also to provide certification and maintenance for companies or landowners wanting quantative data on carbon sequestration. “All this is using an automated and highly scalable swarm technology system. Using this we can plant, up to 100,000 trees per day,” she asserts.

To date Fedorenko’s company has worked with mining companies in Australia, and is now running a new scheme in Myanmar, working on tidal mangrove restoration. Across the world, some 50% of the world’s mangrove forests have been lost in recent years. This is a severe loss, as they can store more carbon than land-based trees, and they also act as highly effective storm surge barriers. Worse, according to one research paper, mangrove loss is responsible for 24 million tons of CO2 emissions ever year. They also provide a barrier in storms. So replacing mangroves has become a peak issue for many governments and NGOs.

“We partner with Worldview International Foundation in Myanmar to engage local community and to create livelihoods for the communities through ecosystem restoration,” says Fedorenko. She says that this project, involving large scale drone-based planting, can theoretically provide thousands of jobs, not only through seed collection and forest maintenance but also through aquatic farming, through carbon sequestration and improved soil quality.

“Plus now we have this opportunity to massively scale up and we are talking about 50,000 hectares of land to not only restore global ecosystems, but also to protect (and support) the  community,” she adds.

“The project in Myanmar is all about community development and enabling people to care for trees, providing them with jobs, and making environmental restoration in a way that it’s profitable for people,” says Federenko. “This is a one stop shop for a full cycle ecosystem restoration. So this is our vision. And this vision is becoming the reality right now.”