The Bay Area is burning
Can Blockchain be used to solve the environmental crisis?
Many Almaden residents woke up to an unprecedented thunder and lightning extravaganza on Sunday, August 16th, despite an intense summer heatwave.
The initial wonder soon gave way to shock and horror as the lightning strikes caused numerous forest fires and massive evacuations throughout the Bay Area during the week. While Almaden valley was spared, it was still surrounded by the SCU and CZU lightning complex fires from both sides, and many were worried about the possibility of the fires folding in or expanding due to more lightning strikes being forecasted for the future. Beloved landmarks like the Lick Observatory and Big Basin were faced with annihilation as the fires crept closer.
I was driving down Almaden Expressway by Leland High School to practice for my driving test and saw the sun going down. It looked so different shadowed by smoke from more than 300 forest fires that were burning in California. The Air Quality Index (AQI) was abysmal at 172, the haze was thick, the visibility was poor, and it was hard to breathe. Yet, the sunsets were brilliant.
Many scrambled to assemble emergency kits and were on alert for evacuation orders because, after the Tubbs fire of Santa Rosa in 2017, most of us know that suburbia is as vulnerable to fires as rural areas. Donation drives were organized by neighbors to help people displaced by the fires. Notices were issued to help the wild animals, who were fleeing the wildfires, and many people in the neighborhood put out buckets of water for the wildlife passing through.
And then on late Monday (August 24th), the National Weather Service cleared the Red Flag warning. The air quality was still quite bad. The blond hills surrounding Almaden looked grey and even the trees looked dull due to the ash floating around. The world seemed to have come to a standstill with an eerie calm and for once that was good news. The firefighters, however, were hard at work trying to contain the blazes that were still burning.
2020 has been a bizarre year by anyone’s standards — with the pandemic initiated shutdowns, PG&E power cuts, and then, the bizarre weather and lightning strikes causing forest fires.
The year is supposed to end with the Presidential elections and a possible meteorite strike predicted by NASA. Yet, secluded in our homes and glued to our screens, it is not hard to see how our climate keeps getting worse.
During the COVID shutdown, it had seemed that the environment was finally getting a break from human activity. The concept appealed to many who wondered if there was some upside to this global tragedy. The daily global carbon emissions were down by 17%, there were reports of wild animals reclaiming urban areas, people heard birdsong, and breathed cleaner air. Those claims quickly dissipated as the shelter in place orders eased and towns and cities rushed to reverse the economic impact of the shutdown by encouraging trade and commerce.
Was this the new normal for us and was this the world that we were planning to leave for our future generations? As a tech enthusiast living in Silicon Valley, I wonder if we can possibly offer technological solutions to some of these problems because shutting down the economy is neither a viable nor a long term option. Could new technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain be used to reverse the change or would they only cause further damage?
We must look beyond the traditional approaches that have so far not seen much success.
In the new digital age, multiple evolving technologies like Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT), robotics, and autonomous vehicles may be combined to bring about the fourth industrial revolution and counteract the global environmental challenge. The report issued by The World Economic Forum in September 2018 on Building Blockchains for a Better Planet, outlines several use cases of how these new technologies may be used for sustainability to help our planet.
What makes Blockchain especially relevant is its “decentralized” “transparent”, and “unhackable” characteristics. We can use it to meet the climate crisis in the following ways:
(i) By introducing transparency in supply chains and providing insight into all the steps of the journey from the farm to our homes, Blockchain can enable us to optimize the supply chain.
(ii) By enabling tracking of household water and energy data through smart sensors, Blockchain can help us to make informed decisions so that we can manage our resources better.
(iii) By using Blockchain-enabled finance platforms, we can deliberately invest in green projects through crowdfunding.
(iv)By decentralizing transactions, Blockchain can incentivize individuals, governments, and corporations to utilize resources that may be wasted or discarded.
(v) By enabling carbon credit transactions, Blockchain can help to reduce our carbon footprint.
(vi) By sharing information securely between multiple parties, Blockchain may help with disaster preparedness and providing humanitarian relief so that resources may be collected from multiple sources and deployed more effectively.
This is not to say that either technology or specifically, Blockchain can solve all our problems. Just like Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain technology is also evolving and its effectiveness will be determined by its scalability and other principles like inclusion, safety, and interoperability.
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If you would like to learn more about Blockchain, you can check out my video. To know more about some of the other Blockchain use cases, see my post.
