The Blockchain Projects Leveraging Data to Advance Climate Action
Validated, reliable data is an essential foundation for building towards meaningful climate action. Rule #1 is simple: you can’t solve a problem you can’t measure or understand. Data, forecasts, and models are critical for measuring the impact of climate and weather events in the short-term and long-term, and then building the tools, applications, and products needed to take immediate action to mitigate and adapt to the risks posed by climate change. Products like parametric insurance that farmers and energy businesses need to hedge weather risk are impossible to build without accessible and accountable climate information.
The regenerative finance (ReFi) space is filled with innovative projects, founders and companies today that are already actively leveraging data or building crucial data infrastructure to accelerate climate action around the world. From oracle technology to bring real world data onto blockchains to critical infrastructure for building and scaling the on-chain carbon economy, we organized responses to a simple question from some of the leading data disruptors in the ReFi/DeFi space:
Why is validated, decentralized climate data important for accelerating climate action and how is your project leveraging data today to build or enable meaningful climate solutions?
Astral Protocol provides novel location-based decentralized web protocols for transparent and verifiable measurements of real world assets. We support several projects in which climate data is essential to verifying the efficacy of regenerative practices.
-Astral Team
Learn More About Astral Protocol: Website | Twitter
Whether it’s parametric insurance, regenerative agriculture, or on-chain carbon credits, blockchain-based climate solutions need a solid foundation of high-quality, real-world data to operate securely and measure impact accurately. Chainlink is a decentralized oracle network that provides smart contracts with secure off-chain data and computation, empowering developers to leverage real-world data to build impactful climate solutions backed by cryptographic truth.
With Chainlink, developers can build data-driven systems featuring unparalleled levels of transparency and accountability, empower local communities to hedge against climate risks, and create an array of new opportunities for promoting sustainable practices and accelerating climate action.
-Chainlink Labs Team
Learn More About Chainlink: Website | Twitter
Data is an essential foundation for building meaningful climate solutions. You can’t solve a problem you can’t measure, and you can’t build active mitigation and adaptation solutions and strategies without reliable, institutional grade climate information. The climate data ecosystem as it exists today is broken. Institutional grade data is expensive, hard to source, and held behind paywalls controlled by centralized private and public institutions, which makes it difficult for startups and founders looking to build forward looking climate solutions to find and access the data they need.
Climate data is a public good, not a private luxury reserved for the world’s largest governments and corporations. To enable communities to proactively measure and manage climate risks, climate information needs to be widely available on an open, immutable ledger that anyone can access and add to. This is what we are building at dClimate. dClimate is making climate data more accessible, available, and accountable via an open, user-friendly marketplace and free API that enables participants to get data and share data. Data consumers can easily find and shop for reliable, validated global data, and data providers gain a direct to consumer mechanism for publishing and monetizing their critical work product.
The dClimate DAO incentivizes new data collection and applications, modeling, and product development within its ecosystem to help communities, governments, and businesses build institutional climate resilience in the 21st century. Any contributor can build applications and tooling on top of the dClimate data layer, or can leverage existing ecosystem apps and products like dClimate’s WorkSight application for the construction industry.
-dClimate Team
Learn More About dClimate: Website | Twitter
It is essential to decentralize the current centralized validation process controlled by Verra and Gold standard (slow, expensive) for mass scale and mass effect. We will be leveraging data (soil carbon, carbon capture, biodiversity, water retention, real estate values, Artificial Intelligence for global SDG values) to showcase our ability to create a new economic system where ecosystem regeneration is incentivized and rewarded.
-ECORISE DAO Team
Learn More About ECORISE DAO: Website | Twitter
OFP’s first and foremost mission is to scale forest-based climate solutions. Our mission begins with the fact that there is a serious bottleneck with the way measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) is done for those who are reforesting or conserving forests. The question of MRV is a question of accountable, trustworthy data for forestation projects: can you reliably prove that you have planted trees and they have grown like you claimed to? One step further, the question of reliable data is the question of financing: can you prove to your stakeholders and investors that you are using their funds as intended and that the project is a success? This touches upon the ultimate problem of making regeneration an economically viable business. Without scaling MRV, we cannot scale forestation; without scaling forestation, we cannot scale nature-based climate solutions. Trustworthy data lies at the heart of accelerating climate action.
At OFP, we solve the MRV bottleneck by providing a blockchain-based platform where forestation data is measured and reported through a mobile app, then verified on-chain through our distributed network of validators, who come in with drone, satellite, and remote sensing technology to do so. Hence, all data processed through OFP is completely transparent and verifiable, given that the entire data history of a forest is recorded on a public ledger immutably. In this way, we offer an alternative to the current system of centralized validation, where forest projects have to go through a handful of legacy institutions in order to be certified in their efforts, which makes forestation impossible to scale due to how slow and costly the process is. With OFP’s tools, we empower forest communities and stewards everywhere to initiate MRV at any time at no cost, and decentralize the validation process so that no one entity is holding up the queue. And finally, we open everything up so that you don’t have to believe in anything other than the final layer of trust — the data itself.
-OFP Team
Learn More About Open Forest Protocol: Website | Twitter
Filecoin Green is building web3-native monitoring and reporting tools for publicly verifiable sustainability claims. Our plan is simple: we are building the tools to measure the environmental impacts of Filecoin and verifiably drive them below zero, building infrastructure along the way that can be leveraged by anyone to make transparent and substantive environmental claims for their own operations.We’re doing this by connecting the entire network to renewable energy, allowing each individual Filecoin Storage Provider to publicly prove their source of electricity. We made Filecoin the world’s most transparent blockchain when it comes to electricity consumption, and built the https://filecoin.energy dashboard to raise the bar for energy transparency, allowing anyone to estimate the energy use of any node in the Filecoin network.
-Protocol Labs Team
Learn More About Filecoin Green: Website | Twitter
Decentralized climate data is central to building transparent carbon markets and tackling pressing climate challenges. At Shamba we strive to make decentralized climate data available to any application that requires it through our bespoke geospatial oracle network.
-Shamba Team
Learn More About Shamba: Website | Twitter
Accessible, immutable, high-quality data is essential for effective environmental protection. This is especially true in developing countries, where traditional, centralized systems of recording and sharing data may not be well established or maintained, or be open to corruption in relation to certain resources. Obtaining a certain baseline is essential to then measuring and monitoring progress, and verifying the results of myriad projects that at present have uncertain impacts.
Toucan brings carbon credits from traditional voluntary carbon markets onto the blockchain, creating a tokenized, digital version of the credit. This is immutably programmed with all the data associated with the original credit, as well as enabling monitoring and reporting data to be easily added.The tokenization process prevents double counting of credits, provides visibility to high quality projects and creates more liquid markets for carbon credits, as those with similar values can be pooled together. This in turn creates a more transparent, consistent price for certain credit types and for carbon to be used and traded as an emerging asset class.
-Toucan Team
