Today, up to 90% of rainforest deforestation is done so illegally. To combat this, The Rainforest Connective has developed a technology that can detect the sounds of logging (think chainsaws and loud bangs) from up to 1km away.

The devices, known as "Guardians," are made from mobile phones, solar panels and an extremely powerful microphone. Placed at specific points around a rainforest to maximise their coverage, they are relatively inexpensive and don’t appear to have any negative ecological impact on the rainforests themselves. Once a sound has been detected, an alert is sent to local authorities who are able to intervene within minutes.

With about half of the man-made carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere over the past 200 years as a result of fossil-fuel burning has been absorbed by either the oceans or land-based vegetation, rainforests are one of our most important assets in the fight against climate change — making the work of The Rainforest Connective and others actively preserving them incredibly important.

Climate change is causing a drastic increase in rainfall, so much so that cities from Seoul to New York are becoming overwhelmed by flooding. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, supercharging storms to dump more water quicker, which can overwhelm traditional sewer systems built for the climate of the past.

In response, urban planners are increasingly thinking of cities less as rain jackets — designed to whisk water away as fast as possible before it has a chance to accumulate — and more as sponges.

“Where once there were forests and fields and wetlands that would soak up the rain, these have been paved over and replaced with surfaces that do not absorb rain,” says Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at the University of California, Berkeley.

By using adsorbent green spaces and digging huge dirt bowls where water can gather and soak into underlying reservoirs, “sponge cities” are making rain an asset to be exploited instead of expelled.