The climate crisis is already costing us a huge amount of money. Here is one article that lists seven climate-related or climate-supercharged disasters costing at least ten billion dollars — each. This trend will only worsen as floods, fires and droughts come back stronger and stronger each year until the climate crisis is solved.
Of course, the huge financial cost we all pay via taxes, lost assets or missed work after these disasters does not take into consideration the loss of biodiversity, loss of human life and negative human health impacts, as well as irreplaceable wildlife treasures which we are losing at a rate of 200 species per day to extinction.
We are in the sixth mass extinction on planet Earth. Sadly, the figure about the number of species we are losing each day is from a staggering 10 years ago, so it has likely risen in the past decade as the climate crisis has worsened dramatically since just 2010. People around the world are starting to see with their own eyes what is going on. It’s no longer in the future.
The good news is that many financial institutions are starting to understand that the most expensive path for us to take is to do nothing. Wealth managers, banks, Fortune 500 companies and others are catching onto this important truth, but it is not happening nearly fast enough, as many of them also depend entirely on or invest in new fossil fuel projects.
It would benefit them greatly to pivot to green areas of business immediately. This would not only secure them a place on the right side of history, but make them a lot of money, ensure a future planet that can reliably support business operations and ventures, and also provide their children and grandchildren with the habitable planet they so deserve (minor perk).
Quality job creation and sustainable economic prosperity rely on transitioning to a zero emission world. This is the future of the economy and where the high quality jobs will come from, be it in engineering, carbon sequestration, technology development, repairs, optimization of infrastructures and buildings, and other sectors. And since the use of and investments in blockchain technology are both steadily growing every year, blockchain looks to be a big part of that future as well.
It makes sense that nearly every day, one can find a new blockchain project related to agriculture, solar power, resource management or supply chain management as well as a host of other climate and environmental areas. There has been a boom of blockchain projects in this category, and for good reason.
Blockchain offers unprecedented ability to track and verify the origins and the lifecycle of goods, also known as “provenance.” It also offers secure decentralized bookkeeping, the ability to make micropayments (which could benefit disaster relief or environmental restoration projects), to reward good business behavior through smart contracts, to trade energy without middlemen, to monitor and verify climate data, to vet charities, and more. All of these advantages can simultaneously benefit the economy, the people and the planet.
Some have rightly criticized blockchain as being environmentally unfriendly, which is a serious concern. RChain has several answers to this challenge and aims to be substantially less energy intensive than other blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum, but with higher speed, improved security and scalability as well. RChain’s mainnet launch will be an exciting step forward in all of these areas.
There are many other blockchain projects who are also aiming to help solve the climate crisis, the pollution epidemic and global resource scarcity in their own ways. Here are seven innovative ventures that you may not have heard about before. While none of these projects can solve our global climate dilemma alone, many of them working together could do an enormous amount of good not only for the planet, but to help shape public opinion as well:
-Blockchain firm BitFury is partnering with the United Nations to plant trees in order to offset its carbon footprint and to help Kazakhstan reach the modest but famous Paris Climate Agreement
-The International Chamber of Commerce invested 40 billion dollars into reducing carbon emissions from aviation in conjunction with the COP25 Climate Conference
-The “My Roots in Africa” project is using blockchain technology to help reforest Africa by 2024
-IBM is backing a blockchain-based project to track the provenance of coffee with a feature that allows users to tip farmers on their app
–Clearway Energy and Power Ledger have partnered in a project to facilitate the trading of what they call “RECs” or renewable energy credits
-Ghislain Irakoze is using blockchain technology to connect recyclers with e-waste like phones and computers to create his vision of a waste-free world
–SansOx is working to provide everyone with clean water solutions and used blockchain to help them fundraise from a borderless base around the world
If you would like to become a member of RChain Cooperative, you can do so at www.rchain.coop. If you’d like to be a guest on our weekly Climate and Coordination RCast on Friday mornings, email us at climate@rchain.coop and let us know what you’d like to discuss or what excites you most about the future.