Drones and Geographical Information Technologies in Agroecology and Organic Farming Contributions to Technological Sovereignty

Abstract

The United Nations decade of ecosystem restoration (2021)(2022)(2023)(2024)(2025)(2026)(2027)(2028)(2029)(2030), the Glashow Climate Pact (November 2021) reaffirms the role of Nature Based Solutions in the fight against climate change and in building shared adaptation solutions. The Glashow Climate Pact highlights the importance of ensuring the integrity of all ecosystems, the protection of biodiversity "recognized by some cultures as Mother Earth, the importance for some of the concept of 'climate justice', when taking action to address climate change".In April 2020 Boaventura de Souza Santos published the "Cruel Pedagogy of Virus" focusing on how the COVID pandemic/syndemic has arrived at the end of six decades of uneven development and highlights the global predatory capitalism and patriarchy embodied in many development discourses, consolidating social exclusion, resource extraction, human and nature domination, environmental injustice, and accumulation by dispossession.Deconstructing development, sustainable development, sustainable growth asks for recognizing practices of critical development, alternative development, alternatives to development, post-development to embrace what Max-Neef called "the development at human scale".Change starts from new practices, challenging the menu of globalizing universalizing development theories and initiatives to inhabit pluriverses of words and worlds.Agroecology, as young science that is about to turn a century, can contribute in various ways to the current challenges of facing environmental and climate emergency, halting biodiversity loss, pursuing just food systems.The indigenous, peasant, and environmental movements of active citizenship, inspired by agroecology, promote food sovereignty, just food systems, the collaboration between food producers and consumers, the renewed alliance between natural, agricultural and urban ecosystems, technological sovereignty, innovation attentive to human rights.This book explores the challenges posed by the new geographic information technologies in agroecology and organic farming. It discusses the differences among technology-laden conventional farming systems and the role of technologies in strengthening the potential of agroecology and organic farming. In conventional thinking, the use of new technologies is an almost exclusive domain vi Preface