Please describe your proposed solution.

The problem

The certification industry is today, like banks, a very manual heavy compliance organization.

Today the certification industry is build up apun trusting central organizations internal governance, compliance rules and the incentives of the people working there - just like old banks today. Today banks are facilitating payments of huge amount of money and have therefore, over decades, built and implemented comprehensive and rigid manual compliance structures to make sure the system is balanced. The same goes for the centralized certification industry which have build their organizations around manual compliance and governance to offer a trusted service of varified carbon credits. The problem is that for the certification of industry to keep upholding their value proposition to the market they rely on the world being non-transparent. If the world was 100% transparent, who would need huge organizations to trust? The certification industry work with trusted bodies who are validating the data that the carbon projects produce. These bodies are all heavily dependent on doing manual work and paid by the hour. These bodies have no incentive to create transparency, because who would then need them?

The certification industry can not change and become transparent because it would mean removing their economic foundation.

The voluntary carbon industry take 80-70% of carbon credit revenue from the project owners who are doing the work on the ground!

Research: http://www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/files/Offsetting_with_CDM_credits.pdf

Scott Poynton, one of our team members and a leader on sustainability issues, wrote the book; “Beyond Certification” which gives insight into the issues and challenges of the certification industry in agriculture supply chains. You can download the book here.

The teams long term vision is:

Today the three largest challenges towards stopping climate change are:

1. Knowledge on what to do to stop climate change. A lot of government and private research is done on how to stop climate change, but very little are converted into actionable items we can all execute on based on our situation and competencies.
2. No financial feasibility because of certification industry. Today, to remove carbon from the atmosphere, you need to be certified by an industry player which cost approximately 70% of all potential profit from carbon credit sales.
3. No scalable solution to support the change. There are no scalable solution today to support the millions of people and organizations wanting participate in removing the desperately needed carbon and no scalable solution for how they can prove and validate the impact they want to do.

The proposed solution

This proposals solution address the second and third challenge above by offering a new way for carbon removal projects to be certified at a fraction of the cost of what the established industry charges today by enabling a world wide community of capable and motivated people.

The solution is a verified members only web application that combines all collected data sources from each carbon removal project and displays it to a community for people with different skills and competencies. The community can for every project oversee the collected data, flag missing data, dispute data etc. with the goal of validating carbon removal projects and their progress decentralized. The overall goal of the decentralized community tasks are to; approve new carbon removal projects, request more data for further evaluation, validate a projects progress, estimate the amount of carbon credits etc.

All data, identities and verification will be documented transparently on the Cardano blockchain for everyone to see and verify.

The data sources used for the community members could be:

Self Reporting: People owning the projects can report data on crops, fertilizer, soil, seedlings, weather, project progress, images as documentation, workflow documentation, work practices etc.

Satellite data: Can be used for estimating land condition; crop, humidity, soil moisture, temperature etc.

Validators: NGOs like The Pond Foundation are in their work supporting a variety of different projects and will be able submit independent observations and interventions.

Registries: Local and global registries for taxation, land ownership, business registrations, GIS data etc.

The first use case will be with the Pond Foundation currently working on the ground i Ghana building a new sustainable agricultural supply chain with local farmers. The use case will be validating 10-30 ghanaian farmers using biochar to fertilize their soil as a carbon removal project.

Pictures from the Pond Foundations project in Ghana and satellite imagery from GAMAYA.

The data sources for this first use case will be satellite data from GAMAYA and data collected by the validator from each farmer by the Pond Foundation team. The community members will be recruited through the Cardano4Climate community and the team members professional network.

More info on the general project here: <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pFIlHzkOQOsRZGTTo4MQIk1sM6bAGtTMolr25Y1PC5c/edit#>

Value for customers and users

This solution will, if scaled, be able to disrupt the multi billion carbon removal certification industry and democratize access for, not just landowners, but everyone to be part of the community helping to fight climate change and earn a supporting income. Today the customers wanting to buy carbon credits on the voluntary market will have to pay a very high price to mitigate the risk of fraud through expensive certification bodies. The proposed solution will enable customers to buy carbon removal credits with full transparency into the data for each project and multi layer verification from the community which will decrease the risk of fraud dramatically. As mentioned above only 20-30% of the revenue from the sale of carbon credits go directly to the people working on the ground.

Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.

This solution will directly impact the amount of CO2 sequestered because the proposed solution will be able to scale and democratize carbon removal certification globally - simply more people will be able to help remove carbon and a global community will support them all the way. If success is reached and thereby a new way of proving carbon removal, the whole world will know and awareness will be massive.

The challenge brief also state:

“The more interesting and useful the products and integrations are that can be built in the ecosystem the more reasons people have to interact with the Cardano blockchain that can help further drive more adoption, feedback, growth and even more innovations.”

This proposal is fully aligned with this brief. Cardano has a big interest in Africa, where agriculture done by smallholder farmers is a key economic and social factor. Providing such a solution directly impact farmers livelihood and will increase adoption & innovation supporting “bank the unbank” vision of Mr. Charles Hoskinson.

This proposal can scale and relate to:

Carbon Marketplaces

Physical products - Carbon credits

Nation governance systems - New governance systems for nation-states

Environment - Solutions that help to solve environmental issues

Sort of DeFi connecting to Microfinance and micro payments for Carbon mitigation.

What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?

Challenge 1: We know building a community is hard, but we belive there is a huge opportunity to turn the widespread climate fatigue into climate action by showing there is a way for everyone to contribute and feel useful. We will start with a focus on the existing Cardano4Climate community, local university students, local climate experts and with support from the experts from the Pond Foundation.

Challenge 2: Making the unit economics sustainable enough to support all stakeholders will be a challenge. The current strategy is for customers buying the carbon credit to pay a premium on top, given the level of transparency and this way support the participating community.

Please provide a detailed plan, including timeline and key milestones for delivering your proposal.

The solution described in this proposal comes out of ideas generated while working on the fund 8 funded proposal “21st century agri supply chain”: <https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/403695>

The above is a design mockup.

The v1 product will be a web application with functionality for working with two data sources; satellite data and NGO collected data. Members of the community need to be verified before being able to join. The verification will for the v1 product happen in a video interview. The new community member will signup using their wallet. The carbon removal project data will be presented in a user interface as tasks for the community to work with. The community will be able to read the data, request more information, refute or approve. The goal is to get community members with a variety of skillsets and through out the project test who would be best capable to complete the different tasks. The tasks will be created for each carbon removal project with “tags” of different skills. Community members will have different skills and be able to pick tasks for those skills. The same task will need to be “done” and verified by to independent community members with the same skill for it to be accepted as “done”. Each task will have a price that will be earned and split between the one doing the task and the two verifiers.

All data, identities and verification will be documented on the Cardano blockchain either through a dapp or the wallets. The v1 product will not deal with price rewards in hard currencies, instead we will use a dummy currency to test the reward system for completing tasks aligned with the goal of being honest and truthful in the validation process. The reason for the dummy currency is to limit capital expense and therefore be free to test different models. Community members can still be motivated by earning dummy currency since it can be used for proving their contribution to the community and farmers.

The framework for compliance and the data defined as needed for a project to be approved for carbon removal will not be the main focus of this proposal since it is a larger effort. We will instead create a dummy framework to be able to prove the community model.

Planned high level activities and deliverables for the “Community validation solution product v1”

Month 1

Research on different existing community governing models.

Initial ideation and concepts for web application

Technical solution design both web and dapp

Voting mechanism design on and off chain

Month 2

UX & UI design mockups

UX flows for web application

Community stakeholder UX tests

V1 product design

Dapp development design

Month 3

Web application v1 development

Dapp v1 development

Month 4

Continued web application v1 development

Continued dapp v1 development

Closed alpha testing with invite-only community members for first use case

Core product usage metrics

Landing page to signup for closed beta product

v2 product description

Planned product roadmap

Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

Please provide details of the people who will work on the project.

The Pond Foundation

The Pond Foundation is a non-profit organization funded by Scott Poynton and dedicated to driving change for good. It exist to guide people and organizations on the journey to reconnect with themselves and drive extensive earth-serving action. For more information :

• The Pond Foundation : <https://thepondfoundation.org/>
• My Carbon zero program : <https://mcz.thepondfoundation.org/>

The pond foundation is the one commissioned by WhatIfFood for the project in Ghana and operating there for the last 9 months.

The foundation is also part of an important related fund 7 funded proposal, the Cardano Carbon Footprint: cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/385045 through which the team is well engaged with the SPO community <https://www.climateneutralcardano.org/> as well as www.Cardano4climate.com community.

Scott Poynton, Sustainability Lead

Scott is a real social and environmental leader for the last 30 years. He created an NGO named The Forest Trust (currently www.earthworm.org) and his estimated positive impact is for about $ 2 trillion of supply chains and millions of hectares of forest. He is now on his biggest mission to mitigate climate change.

Involvement: Leading the project within Ghana and enabling access to stakeholders of the supply chain.

Links: https://www.scottpoynton.com/about-1

For more information please visit:

https://adifferentway.life/

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Yosef Akhtman, Technological lead

Yosef is a technologist and founder with in-depth expertise in Remote Sensing, Environmental Monitoring, Geo-Information Systems, and Machine Learning. He is the founder of Gamma Earth, a research company founded in 2020 and focused on development of advanced Earth Observation and remote sensing technologies for applications in environmental monitoring and precision farming. Previously, he founded and led Gamaya – a Swiss startup in the field of precision agriculture, where he led the development and commercialisation of an integrated digital agronomy solution based on a unique combination of hyperspectral imaging, data fusion and artificial intelligence.

Involvement: Leading the satellite technology development and system architecture

Links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akhtman/

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Magnus Edvard Nielsen, Product Lead

Magnus is a product lead with 10+ years experience in building technology products, teams and companies in both B2B and B2C. He has a strong focus on lean methodologies; build, test and learn to stay close to customers, new market trends, increase product quality and speed of development. A Strong passion for web3, complex digital products, getting from “zero to one” and building a sustainable future for our planet.

In June 2019 traveled to Indonesia for research on Indonesian farmers within rice, coffee, coconut sugar.

From 2017-2021 Leading the innovation team, at one of the biggest PaaS companies within digital supply chains named Tradeshift. The innovation teams two focus areas was decentralized technology and environmental sustainability.

Involvement: Leading the product strategy and design

Links: www.linkedin.com/in/magnusedvard/

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Yoram Ben Zvi, business models lead and connect to the Cardano ecosystem

20+ years of business experience working with technology companies (strategy, partnerships, investors). In the last years, Yoram is focused on combining impact and business. 4 years ago he left his comfort zone and worked for 2 years for an NGO Earthworm.org focusing on sustainable business models across agriculture supply chains.Yoram is very active in Catalyst as a CA, successful proposer, and at Cardano4Climate. Yoram is part of the AIM team and is involved with the Catalyst SDG tool cardanocataly.st/proposer-tool-sdg/#/ (which is included in the proposal process) and the catalyst alignment to SDG research.

Yoram was working on a related project in Indonesia for one year with Earthworm.org together with Magnus and understand the opportunity and the importance of impacting the agri supply chains

Involvement: coordinating ecosystem and business model development.

Links: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yoram-ben-zvi-446836/

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WADA, local support lead and feedback for localisation of technology

WADA gives voice and access to people of African heritage and interest by providing the tools to reimagine new socioeconomic models in a way that reflects local cultures, values and future aspirations. Although our focus is on Africa, WADA is an all inclusive organization structured to provide seekers with providers. This is done with a focus on decentralization, self-organization and distributive governance.

Involvement:

WADA has team members based in Ghana and northern Ghana nearby the project. The WADA team will help to design the solution and validate the solution is suitable for the local market as well as with relevant connections.

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Time management

As team members are presenting multiple proposals in this fund as well as in previous funds here is an explanation regarding the time management:

• Sustainability lead - multiple collaborators and will grow as needed
• Magnus: 20% time on the project focusing on leading the product design, product management and product strategy
• Yoram: here is a link for an explanation of workload management. Overall for this project, Yoram will serve as an admin and business/marketing coordinator
• Yosef: Technical lead and management of development teams. All proposals have very strong synergy from the technological stand-point. Actual development will be carried out by external dev teams as detailed in the proposal. The size of dev teams is flexible and will be adjusted depending on the number of projects being funded. Such structure allows for effective management of multiple complementary projects.

If you are funded, will you return to Catalyst in a later round for further funding? Please explain why / why not.

Yes. We are building a decentralized product with different dapps to support multiple use cases within agricultural supply chains and environmental conservation. The product will benefit greatly with support from the greater Cardano community.

Please describe what you will measure to track your project's progress, and how will you measure these?

Project updates will be shared using Google docs and code will be visible on Github.

We will do a monthly progress reports where we aim to report on the the following KPIs:

• Project status
• Status on deliverables
• Stakeholders engaged
• Product usage numbers:
• # Community members
• # Data throughput
• # Tasks done
• # Carbon projects approved
• # Dummy currency earned
• # Community member satisfaction

What does success for this project look like?

The goal of the project is to investigate solutions for decentralizing certification though validation enabled by a community and to build the first working prototype. Success is providing knowledge to the broader community of Cardano and Catalyst and hopefully proving there is a concrete solution that is feasible and scalable to have a huge impact on smallholder carbon removal projects.

A successful project will return a functioning web application for skilled people to sign up and validate carbon removal projects from Ghanian farmers through on the ground reported data and satellite imagery and earn rewards.

Success will show how the Cardano blockchain can be used to bring real world value to people who need it by proving a use case for radical transparency and blockchain. Attracting new users to the Cardano community and thereby accelerating the wider adoption of Cardano.

Please provide information on whether this proposal is a continuation of a previously funded project in Catalyst or an entirely new one.

21st century agri supply chain:

<https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/403695>

and also NGO transparency:

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/403633