Kosovo loses more than 700 hectares of forest each year. The alarming statistics were presented by Indira Kartallozi, founder of Sustainability Leadership Kosovo (SLK), reports Reuters.
Indira Kartallozi is a director at Kaleidoscope Futures, a lecturer and course assessor at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainable Management. She is recognized as one of the Top 100 CSR Leaders. Kartallozi was a guest speaker during the third edition of the ESG&FRIENDS forum, organized by ESGnews.bg in February in Sofia.
Afforestation with drones
In an attempt to solve the problem, SLK has teamed up with Croatian company Project 02 to launch reforestation by dropping seeds from drones. The process is five times faster than human planting and can reach remote areas faster.
According to environmentalists, deforestation threatens biodiversity and populations of wild animals such as brown bears, lynxes, wild goats and roe deer are declining in Kosovo.
The start of the initiative was given in the village of Butovc, near the capital of Kosovo, Pristina, where flying drones dropped linden and pine seeds, wrapped in soil, on a bare hill.
“We must do everything we can to reforest the thousands of hectares of forest lost to illegal logging and forest fires. The time to act is now, our forests are disappearing. Today we released 500 balls with multiple seeds inside and this is just the beginning before we start mass afforestation in the fall,” said Kartallozi.
How does the technology work?
The technique has already been used in the United States, Brazil, Africa and Europe to counter rapid deforestation. The United Nations Environment Program estimates that forests the size of Portugal are lost globally each year.
For each flight in Kosovo, the drone is filled with about 100 black balls composed of seeds surrounded by a mixture of clay, sand, mineral-rich waste biomass and other ingredients that protect the seeds from insects or rodents.
The drone can seed one hectare in two hours and needs between 2,000 and 5,000 balls depending on the type of seed.
“The advantage is that we can plant on any terrain, especially those that are not accessible to human hands,” said sustainability expert Lara Vukasovic of Project 02.
According to her, about 25-30% of the seeds released germinate, so they plant three times more than necessary.
