FireFly: Community-centric wildfire detection using drones and IoT sensors

In recent years, northern Thailand has faced an alarming rise in forest fires, driven by slash-and-burn agriculture, prolonged dry seasons, and climate change. Chiang Mai was recently ranked as the world’s most polluted city for seven days straight, with an average of 1.7 million people being affected by poor air quality and smoke between February and May every year. It is estimated that Northern Thailand lost 19,000 hectares of forest to wildfires in 2020 alone (Source: WWF).

In response to this persistent problem of forest fires and poor air quality, the APNIC team initiated the FireFly project — a one-year pilot funded by the APNIC Foundation under the ISIF Asia program — to explore community-driven, low-cost early warning systems for wildfire detection.