Hacking well-being from forests

Can health, coding and forest management have something in common? Yes they can! And they already have: our hackathon! What is urgently needed right now is a digital revolution in forest management that will allow us to live in biodiversity rich healthy living environments as well as sustainably utilise wood materials for the numerous products of our day-to-day lives.

Writer

Ernesto Hartikainen

Published

April 7, 2017

We believe digital technologies can enable efficient information sharing and creation of new user-friendly services for forest owners. Finnish forests are largely owned by private individuals and as forest ownership moves to new city owners due to urbanisation and generational shifts know-how related to forest management is dwindling.

This is a chance for developers to hack new solutions in a very traditional field.

Sitra is hosting a challenge at Ultrahack on 21-23 April 2017 in Helsinki, Finland. This is a chance for developers to hack new solutions in a very traditional field where there is a lot of potential for doing something fresh and innovative.

Better solutions are needed

The main goal of forest management has long focused on providing a renewable and sustainable source of wood raw material for various product applications. This goal is great and better solutions are very much needed, but forests aren’t only a source of raw material. In our hackathon, in addition to coming up with solutions for making biomass sourcing more efficient, we would like developers to think of forest-related digital services that can provide additional health and well-being benefits.

For instance, could we optimise our travel or hiking routes for maximal oxygen intake?

Could we use a mobile app to manage our forests in a way that actively increases biodiversity leading to measurable strengthened human immune systems?

Could we create virtual versions of owned forests for designing peace of mind maximising landscapes?

We would like developers to think of forest-related digital services that can provide additional health and well-being benefits

The possibilities for new digital forest-based health-promoting services are endless. Asthma and allergy cause up to 1.5 billion euro costs yearly for Finland’s economy. Combining know-how on forest management practices and health and wellbeing as well as the hacking skills of developers provide enormous potential for creating something innovative and valuable. And we want to support in making these things come to life.

Hope to see you at Ultrahack!

Go to www.ultrahack.org/ultrahack2017sprint1/circular-economy-for-forests and register for our challenge.