Eight Ways the Blockchain Can Influence Our Environment
Blockchain first shook the world in 2017, when all media was bursting with announcements of the new mainstream technology hitting the market. Then, public interest slowly switched to the question of regulation. However, these issues were soon resolved, and blockchain technology was widely accepted by the world community. In fact, a recent survey revealed that more than 80% of participating executives have already developed blockchain-based initiatives at work, with the majority of those surveyed being employed in the financial sector.
As a new technology, blockchain has much more to offer the global community than just facilitating financial services. Blockchain can help the world manage its most disturbing environmental problems.
The hype around the technology is reasonable. Blockchain technology represents an entirely new way of architecting computer systems and networks with completely modernized and cutting-edge opportunities, similar to the ones brought about by the internet or iPhone. Modern young people can’t even imagine a world without these inventions. The internet, personal computers, smartphones — all of them constitute our modern reality. Most would find it very hard to dream up a life without them.
Blockchain is a world-changing technology, but understanding how blockchain can do that is only possible by identifying its principal features. First, blockchain tech operates on consensus mechanisms that provide ledger integrity and immutability, as well as leading cryptographic structure, which enriches the blockchain with a mighty property that could make it a leading solution on the market: people’s trust. Blockchain’s security properties make it very reliable and trustworthy, and these features are very welcomed when it comes to finance and money. People trust in not only the value of the possessed assets but also the origin of the assets, their nature, and this privacy this origin guarantees. This trust is further modified by the positive attitude toward blockchain-based business models and companies working with on-chain solutions. Blockchain technology makes business processes transparent for all, placing people’s highest faith in decentralized networks.
Despite its extensive publicity and mainstream use, blockchain tech will need to deal with a range of difficulties before being globally adopted, like computing systems and mobile phones. Among the main challenges are those who see crypto as a “black industry,” global recognition, the system’s performance drawbacks (such as interactions with other economic sectors and consumption of resources), security questions (such as digital identity issues), and legal, regulatory matters. Resolving these issues might take some time, which will also contribute to the technology’s evolution and adoption in a greater number of industries and areas of human life. When that happens, blockchain can grow to the stage of being able to help humankind deal with its most alarming problems, such as environmental end ecological issues, including consumption of resources or water pollution.
One study of blockchain’s possible use cases investigates its ability to deal with ecological problems, and the results were reported by the World Economic Forum and announced during the Global Climate Action Summit. The study found more than 65 proposed applications for blockchain to assist in addressing the planet’s environmental concerns. Apart from the use cases disclosed by the study, there’s a range of other areas of people’s lives where blockchain can help “save the day” if properly merged with other technologies and innovative solutions. Blockchain can reorganize established business models and turn many processes as we know them today upside down, and that’s not all. It can also help people address climate change and major environment-related issues.
Here’s a list of eight areas where blockchain’s influence can be game-changing.
1. Transparent Supply Networks
All processes within a supply network can be backed by blockchain, creating an immutable detailed record of data from all transactions, starting with the product’s creation. This record can help track the way products move from their launch to the store shelf, transforming the way supply networks are organized and attracting consumer attention to the transparency of supply systems, thus creating a new type of demand for transparently supplied products.
Consistent demand for transparent supply chains could make blockchain an indispensable part of global distribution. In the future, blockchain tech could facilitate supply management to the extent where all participants — investors, manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers, forwarding companies, state regulating authorities, and, of course, consumers — can meet on a single platform to follow products and their deliveries. The platform could provide general and detailed information about the goods and transportation, transparency, and trackability, as well as the ability to check used mechanisms.
Universal access to all supply stages will make price formation clearer and contribute to fair and advanced competition.
2. Blockchain-Backed Resource Handling
Blockchain tech can change the way people consume resources by decentralizing and clarifying management, improving resource efficiency, and promoting conscious consumption. Blockchain-based platforms could gather consumption-related data from households and productions (such as water, fuel, and power consumption) and store it on the blockchain for further use. State authorities, businesses, and regular people would be able to access to the information to make their judgments. Usually, s decisions about resource consumption are made based on suppositions within businesses and local authorities, but the widely available data would help people make the right ones. On-chain solutions can resolve this problem immediately by boosting more knowledgeable decision-making processes in resource handling, promoting the use of renewable resources, dynamic price formations, P2P trade.
3. A New Trillion-Dollar Industry of Digital Finance
Blockchain-based financial technologies and platforms are already drawing attention from millions of investors whose contributions could potentially be directed to financing solutions to environmental challenges. It’s a brand-new way to raise money to solve ecological problems by investing in environmental-friendly infrastructure or forwarding charity money to underdeveloped countries. Blockchain tech can make this process totally transparent, with charity organizations and contributors being able to track the way that funds move via information recorded on an immutable chain. Ecology is one of the many sectors that can be transparently financed with the help of on-chain technologies.
4. Incentivizing Resource Circulation
Blockchain tech can revolutionize the way people use, assess, and value existing materials and resources. Blockchain technologies can be decoded to give incentives to businesses, sates, or regular people who don’t devalue used materials and products and reuse them as much as possible. This approach of remuneration for recycling could drastically change the way people treat waste, making them behave in a completely different way and engaging them in developing modern economies with closed cycles. Initiatives to remunerate people with cryptocurrency for gathering plastics from the ocean already exist.
5. Changing Resource Markets
Blockchain technologies can change the way resource markets function by adding tradable cryptocurrency to the system to advance existing resource-trading platforms. Pioneering the process, some companies have launched carbon credits. They offer businesses tradable credits in exchange for emissions reductions. China stepped even further and launched a specialized blockchain-based platform dedicated to carbon credit management to engage the Chinese market in using resources more efficiently and building a green and clean environment. Blockchain tech adds more credibility and controllability to the program by providing smart contract coding and data. It is highly likely that similar initiatives will pop up for retail-business and households and be accepted globally.
6. Promoting Sustainable Development
Blockchain tech has every chance to increase the sustainability of economies around the globe by assisting businesses with managing their operation more efficiently and enhancing their market performance while making investors and customers more conscious in their decisions. On-the-spot information gathering and storage (for example, on greenhouse emissions) can be arranged with the help of smart contracts, giving the public access to reliable data at any time. Enhanced systems for greenhouse gas data management backed by blockchain could speed up the efficiency of carbon taxation because the effectiveness directly depends on current and reliable data.
7. Back-Up Options in Case of Humanitarian Emergencies
Blockchain tech could be a magic wand for preparing humanity for emergencies and ecological catastrophes by creating a uniform platform accessible to millions of people dealing with disaster management and rescue missions. With the help of smart contracts technology, such a platform could improve efficiency, ensure the proper distribution and management of resources, and allow people to share important information and find help. The platform could assist people in need of life-saving resources, engage supply networks to help get the resources, and notify relief authorities about the requested help. Therefore, blockchain-based technology could mobilize people, equipment, and resources more quickly and deliver help more efficiently.
8. The Planet’s Health Management
Blockchain tech could become the grounds for creating platforms dedicated to protecting global welfare and the environment. For example, they could collect and store data on ocean pollution or the flora and fauna population. This opportunity would enable people to act when needed to save the planet’s ecosystems.
If blockchain is given the green light to invade human lives and activities this much, people will soon see the planet flourishing and thriving due to properly used resource-efficient decentralized techniques and the underlying potential of blockchain to unlock new financial streams and come up with cutting-edge solutions to benefit the planet.
