Timezone: »

 
A Deep Learning application towards transparent communication for Payment for Forest Environmental Services (PES)
Lan Hoang · Thuy Thu Phan
Event URL: https://www.climatechange.ai/papers/neurips2021/68 »

Deforestation accounts for more than 20% of global emission. Payments for Environmental Services (PES) is seen by both policy makers and practitioners as an effective market-based instrument to provide financial incentives for forest owners, particularly poor and indigenous households in developing countries. It is a critical instrument to protect forests, and ultimately to mitigate climate change and reduce emission from deforestation. However, previous studies have pointed out a key challenge for PES is to ensure transparent payment to local people, due to i) weak monitoring and evaluation and ii) indigenous inaccessibility to e-banking and complying with procedural and administrative paper works to receive payments. Specifically, the amount and the complexity of forms along with the language barriers is a key issue; and most transactions need several intermediaries and transaction costs which reduce the payments reaching landowners. To address these issues, we propose a communication platform that links across the stakeholders and processes. Our proposal will utilize Machine Learning techniques to lower the language barrier and provide technology solutions to help indigenous people to access payments. This would also help improve the effectiveness and transparency of PES schemes. Specifically, we propose the use of Natural Language Processing techniques in providing a speech-to-text and auto translation capability, and the use of Graph Neural Network to provide link predictions of transaction types, volumes and values. The pathway to impact will be forest protection and local livelihood through providing financial incentives, and subsequently contribution to more carbon sequestration and storage – a key issue in climate change mitigation.

Author Information

Lan Hoang (IBM Research UK)

My research interests are Deep Reinforcement Learning, GIS, decision support systems, interdependencies of complex systems, agent-based modelling and uncertainty analysis. My focus is to create applied research outputs that can address industry's needs. I have a background in Physical Geography and Environmental Sciences, in particular decision making under climate change impacts, hydrology, water management and GIS applications for environmental management.

Thuy Thu Phan (Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR))

More from the Same Authors

  • 2022 : SCERL: A Benchmark for intersecting language and safe reinforcement learning »
    Lan Hoang · Shivam Ratnakar · Nicolas Galichet · Akifumi Wachi · Keerthiram Murugesan · Songtao Lu · Mattia Atzeni · Michael Katz · Subhajit Chaudhury
  • 2019 : Poster Session »
    Ahana Ghosh · Javad Shafiee · Akhilan Boopathy · Alex Tamkin · Theodoros Vasiloudis · Vedant Nanda · Ali Baheri · Paul Fieguth · Andrew Bennett · Guanya Shi · Hao Liu · Arushi Jain · Jacob Tyo · Benjie Wang · Boxiao Chen · Carroll Wainwright · Chandramouli Shama Sastry · Chao Tang · Daniel S. Brown · David Inouye · David Venuto · Dhruv Ramani · Dimitrios Diochnos · Divyam Madaan · Dmitrii Krashenikov · Joel Oren · Doyup Lee · Eleanor Quint · elmira amirloo · Matteo Pirotta · Gavin Hartnett · Geoffroy Dubourg-Felonneau · Gokul Swamy · Pin-Yu Chen · Ilija Bogunovic · Jason Carter · Javier Garcia-Barcos · Jeet Mohapatra · Jesse Zhang · Jian Qian · John Martin · Oliver Richter · Federico Zaiter · Tsui-Wei Weng · Karthik Abinav Sankararaman · Kyriakos Polymenakos · Lan Hoang · mahdieh abbasi · Marco Gallieri · Mathieu Seurin · Matteo Papini · Matteo Turchetta · Matthew Sotoudeh · Mehrdad Hosseinzadeh · Nathan Fulton · Masatoshi Uehara · Niranjani Prasad · Oana-Maria Camburu · Patrik Kolaric · Philipp Renz · Prateek Jaiswal · Reazul Hasan Russel · Riashat Islam · Rishabh Agarwal · Alexander Aldrick · Sachin Vernekar · Sahin Lale · Sai Kiran Narayanaswami · Samuel Daulton · Sanjam Garg · Sebastian East · Shun Zhang · Soheil Dsidbari · Justin Goodwin · Victoria Krakovna · Wenhao Luo · Wesley Chung · Yuanyuan Shi · Yuh-Shyang Wang · Hongwei Jin · Ziping Xu