GoodCollective — Using diverse dMRV solutions for Conservation Basic Income
By Lauren Serota & Hadar Rottenberg
Abstract: GoodCollective provides direct payments to those on the frontlines verifiably safeguarding and restoring their local environment. In this article, we break down the design of the platform, and why it serves as an example of the interoperability, transparency and scale possible when multiple partners build on public blockchains with common standards.
Billions of people take climate action every day, many of them in the world’s poorest countries. We built GoodCollective to make this action visible and provide a last-mile solution to compensate those on the frontlines.
In recent years, abundant technologies have emerged to mitigate the impacts of climate change. New tech inspires hope — robust LIDAR satellite imaging brings us real-time and high-fidelity remote sensing of Earth-critical habitats, predictive weather models leveraging AI/ML help us plan for adaptation more accurately and on a greater time horizons than ever before, and inexpensive, portable DNA sequencing empowers citizen scientists to monitor micro biodiversity.
We see an influx of bright minds bringing their experience to various parts of the climate industry. However, the challenge ahead of us requires systems — technical, operational, financial, and social — that support a symphony of locally appropriate solutions and effectively leverage scalable, lightweight technology. Frontline climate stewards are often excluded from conversations of climate change mitigation, or relegated to a “social consultation” after a project has been designed and financed. They ought to be in the center of our solutions, our impressive technology working for them.
We focused on the “last mile” of climate action with GoodCollective — a product built for climate stewards themselves. The goal was to create a platform that enabled different communities and climate initiatives to set their own automated payment disbursements linked to verified climate action. Designing for interoperability first and by default leverages the breadth of emergent digital technologies to make scalable and equitable climate impact.
GoodCollective provides direct payments to those on the frontlines verifiably safeguarding and restoring their local environment. The platform can integrate across any project to provide additional financial support directly to community members — from simple donations to structured Climate Subsidies or Conservation Basic Income. Our simple interface works between a variety of digital Measurement Reporting and Verification (dMRV) solutions and a direct payments smart contract, which can be easily utilized by the flourishing ecosystem of project developers with close ties to local communities and dMRV solutions.
GoodCollective is built on the GoodDollar protocol and payment rails and was made possible by funding from Climate Collective and significant in-kind contributions from GoodDollar, generous support from dOrg and our pilot partners, DeTrash and Silvi.
Behind the design
User types:
There are 4 user types in the GoodCollective system:
- Climate Steward: A person on the frontlines who is personally involved in a climate-positive activity, such as trash recovery, reforestation, regenerative farming or biodiversity stewardship.
- dMRV provider: An organization with digital means of measuring and verifying a steward’s climate impact.
- Project Developer/Community Organizer: An organization with a relationship with Climate Stewards, who coordinates the work and administers the GoodCollective pools (note: can sometimes be the same as the dMRV provider — like in the case of our pilot partner Silvi).
- Donor or Purchaser: A person or organization with a financial interest in the climate work being done.
How it works
The transparency, traceability, and immutability of automated payment smart contracts and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) provide a new way to approach payments to individuals for verified climate impact. We created a payments smart contract triggered by an NFT per stewardship event that can be minted by any approved partner (e.g. project developer or dMRV provider).
The parameters for the NFT were designed to work across a diversity of measurement methodologies and include necessary information about the climate stewards’ relevant activities, verification by the partner organization based on a verified impact measurement methodology, and the stewards’ wallet addresses.
We chose to use NFTs specifically because of their:
- Uniqueness: each climate action = a unique NFT event on a public blockchain
- Data storage capabilities: relevant measurement attributes required for auditability of climate impact & correspondence of payment to stewards’ wallets
Each community climate initiative — for example, a specific biodiversity monitoring, reforestation, or waste diversion project — is its own GoodCollective. When a new collective is created (called a “Pool” in our smart contract), the collective sets its own parameters for verified climate impact, and corresponding payments. Specifically, the collective administrator configures the amount to compensate each individual for their climate actions based on the type and quantity of the climate action as defined by the dMRV partner. For example: “pay each steward X amount per hectare measured and verified, with a maximum of X per month”). Once the pool is created, anybody can donate using a variety of currencies supported on the Celo blockchain. Funds are then automatically distributed to climate stewards only when they interact with these dMRV technologies and their activity is verified.
Creating collectives is “permissionless”, meaning anyone can open a pool to receive donations and mint NFTs to distribute them as rewards. This means that GoodCollective can be used in myriad ways, including to track both payment and climate impact for Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) projects; to distribute a regionally calibrated Conservation Basic Income; or to create auxiliary funding for stewards whose work results in provision of ecological assets (such as carbon or biodiversity credits).
At this time, for a GoodCollective to be featured on our official UI and dApp it has to be vetted first by the GoodCollective team. We are thankful for our first two partners Silvi and DeTrash, and our future partner Open Forest Protocol for stress-testing our design and approach.
Features
Impact reporting — Each minted NFT is expected to contain links to the data proving the action has taken place, including traceability to actual measurements where possible.
Donation Streaming — In Web3 there is currently no easy way to deliver recurring payments. One of the advantages of using the GoodDollar token on Celo is the ability to create payment streams utilizing Superfluid. As long as a donor has a sufficient balance in their account, the donation flows to the pool at the rate they have defined.
Security — Community Organizer / Project Developer’s point of view: the “trusted entity” is the dMRV partner. This reduces exposure to fraud and bugs. They can set limits on the rewards to be paid out from the pool and of course revoke the NFT minting permissions from the dMRV provider. They can also define logic on which wallet addresses are valid to receive rewards. For instance, using Celo’s ability to link a wallet address to a mobile number, community organizers can maintain a secure, convenient “rolodex” to track distributions. Wallet addresses can also be required to pass the GoodDollar unique human verification to avoid fraud.
Donor point of view: the “trusted entity” is the collective (pool) creator. At this point in time, the GoodCollective team will mark verified collectives, but in the future more open verification methods can be implemented.
Leveraging the transparency of data stored in NFTs, the donor can also inspect past dMRV data to verify the partner’s credibility.
Open Source — All code for the smart contracts and the GoodCollective dApp are completely open source and can be found on Github. All documentation in our pilot design toolkit is also available for use under a Creative Commons 4.0 BY NC license.
G$ Token Double Impact — GoodDollar is a 630,000+ person non-profit digital payment network with a verified identity solution, built with an embedded digital basic income delivered in G$ token. GoodDollar distributes digital currency to hundreds of thousands of people around the world, many located in the world’s poorest countries. Climate deployments built on Good Collective have the aggregated impact of helping to support the global GoodDollar UBI for all users, as the more Collectives that are deployed, the more the GoodDollar UBI protocol is funded, and the higher the value of G$ UBI enjoyed by all global members.
What’s Next?
We’re just getting started, and the coming months will include working through the following:
- How to operationalize the permissionless vetting of pools
- Building an easy UI to create collectives (currently done manually on the back-end)
- Interoperable “Proofs of Impact/Donation” integrations with protocols such as Gitcoin, Hypercerts
- Interoperable stacking atop ecological asset provision (with partners such as Open Forest Protocol)
- Further ability to explore and audit provided dMRV data
- Displaying more detailed dMRV data in a privacy-preserving manner
Are you a project developer, community organization or dMRV provider interested in creating a collective, and an additional income stream to your local stakeholders? If so, please apply to start a GoodCollective.
You can also help by:
- Administering blockchain-based pools on GoodCollective on behalf of a local stewardship community
- Integrating your protocol to Stream/redirect yield into GoodCollective donation pools
- Funding a particular climate deployment
And of course, consider donating to support the above activities and the further development of the GoodCollective platform!
GoodCollective — a platform for paying frontline climate stewards for their verified climate action.
Thank you to Kyle Becker, Alison Filler, Nirvaan Ranganathan and Anna Stone for your thoughtful review of this article.
