The role of Blockchain-based community currencies in the fight against climate change.
Last weeks were quite intense for global politics in general and, especially, for those involved in the fight against climate change. The massive mobilizations of September 20th that gathered four million people spread across 170 countries were the prelude to Greta Thunberg’s strong accusations at the UN Climate Action Summit. Even if as a result of the summit 47 new countries committed to intensify their transition towards a low carbon economy, it is also true that the largest greenhouse emitters (China, the United States and India) did not show that level of engagement.
Since the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2016 the problem of climate change has only aggravated:
According to a recent report of the WMO the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached new records in the period 2015–2019.
In line with this, in the last few years the rate of global mean sea-level rise has amounted to 5 mm per year, compared with 4 mm per year in the 2007–2016 ten-year period. It is against this contradiction between the political discourse and the scientific evidence that millions are raising.
In a very short time the Fridays for Future initiative has been successful at putting the spotlight on the problem of environmental degradation. Taking the debate to the level of high politics, as it happened last week in New York, is important because it helps to set the agenda. But the failure of nation states and supranational institutions to comply with the targets that they set for themselves proves that if there is a solution, it must come from somewhere else. Radical changes at the societal level, if they are to be impactful and sustained in time, need to be embedded in people’s habits. And, to be acquired, behavioral changes take much more than world leaders’ “empty words”.
They require consciousness and repetition. And, normally, they need from an external impulse that induces (or reminds) the individual to execute the action that involves the change in the habit that it wants to modify. After some time the external impulse could be removed, but the individual would keep on behaving as if it was still there — the positive action would have become a habit.
The emergence of Blockchain not only has brought in new technology, but also new ways of thinking about how the economy works (or could work). The concept of the token economy, where a competitive game can be reshaped into a cooperative one by means of a well-designed incentive structure, can be well combined with the need of making the structural behavioral changes that our planet needs us to do, and that the world leaders will never carry out.
In a small corner of South America, far from the centres of global power, a group of enthusiastic professionals are working to combine all these ideas into a project that is capable of building a solution to one of the multiple causes of environmental degradation: the pollution brought about by a poor waste management system.
The Colmena Project (the Spanish word for “hive”) is applying the principles of the token economy to take advantage of valuable resources that the community discards to transform them into new resources that can be reintegrated into new value chains.
By means of the collaborative recycling of plastic waste at the local level and the subsequent manufacturing of new products with recycled plastic, a virtuous economic loop is created. The cornerstone of this circuit is given by the Jellycoin, a token specifically designed to reward those who contribute to the growth of the system. In order to involve the whole community, not only households are invited to participate, but also local businesses, social organizations and the government. The transportation of the waste from the households to the recycling centre will be organized in a collaborative way in such a way that the carbon footprint is reduced even more. The project is being developed in the town of Campo Viera, in Argentina.
Jellycoin is designed in such a way that anyone that takes the (previously classified) residues to the recycling center is credited with tokens. These tokens can be used either to consume at the local shops or to pay local taxes. When the Jellycoins are transferred to the government as taxes they are burnt. The government is willing to accept the tokens as a means of tax payment (which in practice means a reduction in its income of Argentinian pesos) because as a result of the implementation of Jellycoin, some of the expenditures related to waste management will be saved. Thus, the Jellycoin token not only encourages people to behave in a more environment-friendly fashion, but also strengthens the local trade circuits (it ends up working as a community currency).
A project like Colmena, designed and implemented in Argentina, is a clear example of why the solutions have to be built from the bottom up. Right now, in Argentina there are more than 5,000 open-air dumps. In the places where there are landfills, the government has to pay to bury residues that, if properly treated, could be transformed into valuable resources. To make matters worse, last month the national government made a decree that allows the country to import waste from abroad. It is still a mystery why a country that is currently not recycling the waste its inhabitants produce needs to import residues from other places. Where politicians darken the horizon the Colmena Project sheds a light of hope.
As it is being thought the Colmena Project can benefit from Blockchain because it is essential that tokens are minted on the basis of the recycled waste. In order for the system to be reliable a network of hardware oracles is being designed. By means of it, users will deposit their waste in these machines, which will in turn mint and allocate the tokens to the corresponding user. But not any Blockchain can provide what projects like Colmena need without violating their core values, i.e., the transition towards a sustainable development model. As it is well known, a common problem of Blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum is the excessive use of energy that is ultimately wasted. By contrast, EOSIO uses a consensus protocol that makes it 66,454 times more energy efficient than Bitcoin and 17,236 times more efficient than Ethereum.
Right now, EOS mainnet uses 1261.44 MWh and emits 562 tonnes of CO2 per year, far below the average of other widespread Blockchains. This is why EOSIO seems to be the perfect partner for those who want to build the dApps that will shape a sustainable future.
The development of systems that are capable of aligning the behaviour of the diverse actors that make up the society in a way that is consistent with the common good cannot wait any longer.
The token economy can provide the models to design the creative solutions the world needs. Blockchain can be the technology that brings these solutions to reality.
The changemakers with the strength and the will to spread them across the planet seem to be forging in different corners of the world. Maybe, hopefully, not all is lost yet.
