Web 3 engaged in the climate change talks at COP27
The UN Climate Change Conference (COP) is the annual meeting of the 196 parties to the UNFCCC. The conference is held in a different region of the world each year and is the main fora for governments to discuss action on climate change in line with the objectives of the Paris Agreement.
This year’s conference, COP27, was held from November 6 to 20, 2022 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, under the theme “Together for Implementation”, with a view to accelerating global climate action particularly by responding to the needs of those who are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
There were 30,000 people registered to attend representing not only governments, but also observers from businesses, NGOs, civil society groups, intergovernmental organizations and the press.
Among them there were some new voices in town keen to discuss how Web3 tools, infrastructure, funding mechanisms and governance protocols could help accelerate decarbonization and removal efforts, allow for greater transparency and unlock new sources of climate finance.
They approached the negotiations newly invigorated after the Ethereum Merge. By changing their consensus model from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake they had managed to reduce their carbon footprint overnight by over 99.99% (most likely the biggest decarbonisation effort ever achieved in history).
They were very engaged and keen to showcase emerging regenerative finance solutions which could help achieve the Paris goals. The main forum for these conversations was the UNFCCC Innovation Hub, within the Blue Zone, a UN-managed space where negotiations were hosted and where all attendees were accredited by the UNFCCC Secretariat.
A compilation of all the sessions streamed from the #UGIH premises at #GlobalInnovation4Climate are available here.
Newsworthy on the penultimate day was the launch of the Ethereum Climate Platform, an initiative led by ConsenSys and Allinfra, together with a group of tech companies and civil society leaders: AAVE, Art Blocks, Celo, the Climate Collective, Codegreen.Org, Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, ERM, Filecoin Green, Gitcoin, Global Blockchain Business Council (GBBC), Huobi Global, Laser Digital, Microsoft, Polygon, UPC Capital Ventures, and W3bcloud, in collaboration with Gold Standard.
Vlinder has also applied to join and is keen to take part in this initiative.
The goal is to address Ethereum’s past carbon emissions since the network’s launch in 2015, as well as to incentivize and fund the development of real-world projects that will mitigate GHG emissions and deliver positive environmental and social impacts long into the future.
Another promising endeavour was the launch of Climate Action Data Trust (CAD Trust), by the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA), a decentralised metadata system to link, aggregate and harmonise all major carbon market registry data, in a joint initiative with The World Bank and the Singapore government (recording available here).
The platform will go live in early December at https://climateactiondata.org.
Outside the conference center, on Friday 11 November, the Hub Culture’s Climate Pavilion with Hedera and Filecoin Green hosted the “Regenerative Finance Forum” which covered topics including Climate Markets, Making Sustainability Finance Auditable, Digitizing and Open Sourcing Methodologies, Scaling Validation and Verification, Liquidity in Climate Markets, Venture & Impact Investing, and more.
2022 was the year the #ReFi movement took off while current solutions fail to deliver the change required to address the most pressing threat to humanity. The time window for action is closing. As we were reminded by the People’s Declaration for Climate Justice, representing Indigenous Peoples, Women and Gender, Youth, Workers and Environmental and climate justice movements across the world, we need to “ensure and enable just transitions that guarantee everyone has the right to live with dignity and in balance with our planet”.
