🎫 How to use tokens to preserve the environment

5 min read

📗 Environment and tokens

In modern human history, awareness about the environment is increasing in line with the improvement of our quality of life. Evolving from a superstitious belief such as don’t go to a mystical forest or don’t cut down a sacred tree, to a community stopped dumping waste to the river to protect the fish supply, and lastly to centralized government regulation on deforestation or taxes on pollution.

But there is also another way to keep the environment pristine, which is adding a price to it or a sort of token of exchange. Growing up in Indonesia, I learned about “Bank Sampah” which means the waste bank. It is a self-organized waste facility where the local community could bring waste in exchange for cash or voucher.

After moving to Germany, I found a similar concept where we could bring back used bottles to get some money back, or in most cases exchanging empty beer bottles for more beers (🍺 Circularity 1.0). No matter in what shape or form, tokenizing the environment actually works! here are 3 other examples that I have been pondering on:

🏭 Carbon credit scheme

Carbon credit is a mechanism where for every ton of carbon dioxide or other Green House Gas emission (GHG) that is avoided/ sequestered from projects such as reforestation or renewable energy, a certificate will be produced and available for trade.

In short, putting a price on carbon. I learned about carbon credit for the first time during an environmental management class during college, the same time with the introduction of the Australian carbon tax back in 2013 (which was scrapped shortly afterward).

At that time, only some have a clue of how carbon credit works or how reliable it is. There were also stories about “Carbon Cowboy”, rogue businessman exploring deep jungle of Borneo and the Amazon to set up dodgy projects claimed for carbon credits. Fast forward to the 2020s, certified carbon credit is now a widely adopted concept in sustainability.

Now anyone, companies, or even countries can offset their carbon emission by purchasing carbon credits that match the amount of their carbon emission. If you are interested to offset your emission, check out the Klima app where calculating and offseting your carbon emission can be as easy as creating a tinder profile 🍃.

🤑 Klima DAO Token

While listening to one of my favorite crypto podcast “Bankless”, I stumbled upon the Klima Dao project (Different from the Klima carbon app). Klima is a Decentralized Anonymous Organization (DAO) with a vision to create a token that is backed by carbon credit, certified by a credible organization such as Verra, so it’s legit.

1 Klima token is equal to 1 tonne of carbon emission sequestered from the environment. This is a breakthrough concept! it allows people who care and want to tackle climate change to own a token that has real value to the environment. If more Klima token is distributed, the supply of carbon credit will deplete while the demand will keep increasing as many businesses and countries have pledged to become carbon neutral.

Klima DAO adopts the Gamestopping strategy, trying to pump the price of carbon for the sake of the environment by buying lots of carbon credits and HODL-ing the Klima token. As a result, scarcity of carbon credits will lead to an increased price of the Klima token and benefits its owners. According to Mckinsey, the carbon market is expected to be a $50 billion industry in 2030, equivalent to the size of the global music industry in 2020.

As a decentralized organization, Klima DAO does not have a leader or group of elites that can control the system for their own benefit. The early members are all anonymous and its governance is based on token ownership, so if you own Klima token, you have voting rights to determine the future of the project (e.g tech, supply, rules of play, etc).

Although the project is still in its infancy (started in October 2021), it has attracted more than 50K members who called themselves “Klimates”, contributing to the project while sharing green crypto memes. In the past, we can only rely on government or experts organization to make big decisions about our planet. Now, by putting a share of our wallet thus having skin in the game, we can act, own, and also gain financial benefits by mitigating climate change.

If you are interested to become “Klimates”, join the discord here and buy the tokens from a decentralized exchange such as Sushiswap (Disclaimer: this is not financial advice, only an environmental one).

🖼️ Green NFT

Since the boom of NFT in early 2021, lots of people have strong opinions rejecting the idea of digital ownership. Other than the right-click and copy nonsense, another strong critic is the high energy consumption of the Ethereum network.

This issue has partly been addressed as a lot of NFT projects are becoming carbon neutral, but more can be done to leverage NFT for the environment. Here are some examples of the more sustainable or green NFTs.

1. World of waves, a project that launched a charity NFT platform to support ocean conservation initiatives.

2. The burly bear, a  project that promotes the protection of endangered bear species around the world with cute-looking bear NFTs including the polar bears.

3. South Pole, a renowned climate change consultancy, launched its own NFT marketplace based on the Near protocol, which has a lower carbon emission than Ethereum thanks to the proof of stake model. South Pole also stated that 50% of any NFT sales on its platform will be used to fund climate action/ carbon sequestration projects. As this space is still new, we could expect more projects in the future using NFT to preserve the environment.

Conclusion

I want to conclude this article with a story about easter island, a small isolated island famous for its mysterious stone statues. Different experts have come up with different theories of the origin of the statues and how it impacted to the collapsed of the indigenous civilization.

David Attenborough, the well-respected nature conservationist, believed that the local community vanished because they destroyed the local environment from excessive stone mining and clearing of the forest, to build thousands of statues.

Until now, no one knows why the local population did it, but we can still learn that if we destroyed our own environment to build things that will be “useless” in the future, our great civilization could also be at risk.

As we are experiencing one of the drastic environmental changes in history, we need to utilize new concepts and technologies to preserve the environment while improving our way of life, and the use of crypto tokens could be one of the solutions.

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