
Topher White
Inspiring and enabling people to find solutions to complex environmental problems
Biography
Topher White is the founder and CEO of Rainforest Connection, a nonprofit tech company fighting to save the rainforests from illegal logging and poaching using cutting-edge environmental tech. He’s a recipient of the SAP Innovation Award | Next-Gen Innovator (2018) and the Pongo Environmental Prize (2016). He was also a Draper Richards Kaplan Fellow (2016) and a National Geographic | Emerging Explorer (2015).
Employability
Speaker
Topics
A Shared Purpose: Enabling Rainforest Protection With Conservation Technology
Rainforest Connection has created the world’s first real-time monitoring platform for protecting remote forests by capturing sound signatures of destructive activities, such as chainsaws and illegal incursions.
Besides scalable deployments that protect forests, tribes (under threat) and key biomes– the biggest impact is sharing massive amounts of ecosystem data which are streamed to the cloud automatically - that can be used by the world’s biologists, researchers, data analysts, land managers, governments, and law enforcement.
We work with partners on the ground who receive alerts and reports on patterns of activity for chainsaws and vehicles used in logging. Such partners include park rangers, indigenous tribes, NGOs, and government officials.
Saving rainforests isn’t only the key to halting climate change, It’s also vital to supporting many of the world’s poorest communities who rely on rainforests for food, shelter and livelihood.