The blockchain community with the climate change community in some concrete and scalable investments into DLT and climate action.
The United Nations Environment Programme has identified transparency, clean energy, carbon markets and climate finance as areas where blockchain technology can accelerate climate action.
At the Middle East and North Africa , and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia drew together blockchain stakeholders in the MENA region to shape a common understanding of the technology’s potential for supporting countries with climate action, which was followed by the Blockchain4Climate networking event.
Algorand has declared its blockchain to be entirely carbon-neutral; Kickstarter is building a crowdfunding platform on the carbon-negative blockchain platform Celo; and SavePlanetEarth is setting up certified Carbon Credit Smart nonfungible tokens on Phantasma, a green for developers to build their decentralized applications.
We are seeing a maturation and proliferation of such projects as people innovate for climate action — e.g., TreeCoin sells tokenized assets tied to eucalyptus trees and reinvests them in eucalyptus trees in Paraguay.
Moreover, organizations such as Evercity and Blockchain Triangle are robust integrated platforms that guide and aggregate initiatives and carbon credits, linking them to investors and financial mechanisms, such as digital green bonds through blockchain-driven platforms. The capacity to include these voluntary market credits in national reporting under the Paris Agreement is also being addressed through initiatives such as Blockchain for Climate and its Bitmo platform and the Open Earth Foundation and its Nested Climate Accounting for the Paris Global Stocktake.
Blockchain technology can help improve and manage smart grids in decentralized energy markets and allow reliable and transparent peer-to-peer power trading enables consumers to buy, sell, or exchange excess renewable electricity directly with one another.
New technologies that significantly reduce fabrication costs and the massive adoption of mobile phones in developing countries make it possible for solar panels to be connected to the blockchain to enable consumers to benefit from distributed generation.
NFTs are increasingly being leveraged for climate change, with initiatives ranging from raising awareness to fundraising; moreover, NFTs are used as an immutable record for impact and carbon credits.
GreenApes deploys gamification to help people understand their carbon footprint, and we can expect to see more games where people can play to earn for climate action.
Blockchain technology can create new digital economies that unite and economically align people around a common purpose.
We all know that the news media plays a critical role as one of the primary means through which scientific and technological issues are brought to the attention of the general public.