At the time, millions of credits from the same project were trading on the market for less than $20 each.
To find answers, Climate Home News dived into a community of cryptocurrency investors, connecting on messaging apps Telegram and Discord.
Since November 2021, SPE has sold 1,000 limited edition carbon credits as NFTs, from credits certified by market standard Verra, for an average price of $1,770.
Central to SPE’s investment case is a claim to have government contracts to plant more than a billion trees in Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives.
These involve taking carbon credits out of the existing market and putting them on a blockchain where they can be bought with cryptocurrency, allowing traders to speculate on the price of a tonne of carbon.
Ali described himself as “an environmentalist” and a father concerned about his daughter’s future – “not a crypto person”.
While Climate Home could not verify the figure, supporters of the venture exchange hundreds of messages every day on its Telegram channel.
New generations of blockchain use a different security test that uses just 0.1% of the energy, explained Johannes Sedlmeir, who researches electricity use in blockchain technology at German research centre FIM.
Every day, a “Save Planet Earth helper” account shares a “to-do list” for investors to keep SPE trending on crypto currency trading platforms and social media.
“Super stoked for Imran’s update from Pakistan.
“SPE is a diamond in the rough,” Adam, a firefighter from Southampton, UK, told Climate Home, comparing it favourably to the rest of the “greed-based” crypto world.
One of the few women active in SPE’s investor community, Hannah, of the UK, said she started buying cryptocurrencies to make some extra cash but invested in SPE to support climate action.
In marketing material for investors, Save Planet Earth cites analysis by the OECD which suggests that a carbon price of $147 a tonne is needed by 2030 to cut global emissions to net zero by 2050.
In practice, carbon pricing is not the only tool of climate policy.
SPE’s ambition doesn’t stop at carbon credits.
Ali told Climate Home over the phone SPE was run by volunteers, including developers, “who are passionate about the environment”.
“SPE is doing really well and what it has achieved in a short time is immense, while also launching additional environmental projects.
Nine months after its launch, SPE said it had contracts to plant 1.1bn trees: one billion trees in Pakistan – a tenth of the country’s national target – 100 million trees in Sri Lanka and one million in the Maldives.
Pakistan’s climate minister Malik Amin Aslam told Climate Home in an email he had never heard of SPE and was “quite surprised” by its claim.
He said officials at the tree tsunami initiative and local authorities in Kashmir had “no objections” to the project and there was “no need for any agreement with the climate change ministry”.
In fact, while SPE says it has planted 25,000-27,000 trees to date, none have been used to generate carbon credits.
In the Maldives, SPE signed an MoU with the Maldives Integrated Tourism Development Corporation , a government-owned enterprise focused on growing the tourism industry.
Mohamed Nasheed, Maldives’ former president and a long standing climate advocate, told Climate Home that planting one million trees in the Maldives was a “huge” target.
In Sri Lanka, the director of the Central Environmental Authority Kosala Welikannage wrote a letter in May, seen by Climate Home, introducing SPE to six tea plantations.
Ali said he had “enough leads” in Sri Lanka to meet the 100m tree target by planting fruit trees such as jackfruit, mangos, durians and avocados, on private tea plantations, which would allow SPE to issue carbon credits.
The choice of fruit trees raised an eyebrow for Meredith Martins, assistant professor at the North Carolina State University, who has studied agroforestry systems in Sri Lanka.
“If you want to sell carbon credits you have to make sure that they are grounded in reality,” Vidal said.
When Climate Home put it to Ali that he was misleading investors, he replied that SPE was “in its early stages” and that the pandemic had made the work “really difficult”.
SPE is one of a flurry of crypto ventures to have seized on surging demand for carbon offsets.
Supporters say this will make the carbon market more transparent, verifiable and easier to access for individuals and companies seeking to offset their emissions.
A key concern is that by putting credits on a blockchain, it removes it from the control of the carbon standard that issued it.
The use of carbon credits to offset emissions from burning fossil fuels is controversial, regardless of how transactions are carried out.
Trading carbon credits on a blockchain does not make them any better for the climate, argued Gilles Dufrasne, policy officer at Carbon Market Watch.
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