Please describe your proposed solution.
The problem
Land degradation is one of the world’s most pressing environmental problems and it will worsen without rapid remedial action. Globally, about 25 percent of the total land area has been degraded. When land is degraded, soil carbon and nitrous oxide is released into the atmosphere, making land degradation one of the most important contributors to climate change. Scientists recently warned that 24 billion tons of fertile soil was being lost per year, largely due to unsustainable agriculture practices. If this trend continues, 95 percent of the Earth’s land areas could become degraded by 2050.
<https://www.thegef.org/what-we-do/topics/land-degradation>
Commercial agriculture is the most important driver of deforestation, accounting for 70-80% of deforestation worldwide. And to feed a growing population shifting to meat and dairy-heavy diets, agricultural production will need to increase by 25% by 2050.
WWF, Living Forests Report 2015 https://wwf.panda.org/discover/our_focus/forests_practice/forest_publications_news_and_reports/living_forests_report/
Today forest conservation or transformation to regenerative agricultural farming rely heavily on donations from companies, NGOs or governments to fund it. Funding through donations does not scale to have the needed impact on climate change. Alternatively projects such as for forest conservation or transformation to regenerative agricultural farming could be certified to remove carbon and thereby sell carbon credits to fund the forest conservation or agricultural transformation - but there exists no cheap way to be certified for carbon removal.
The process of starting up a project to be certified is today extremely expensive and not possible for small carbon removal projects. The minimum is estimated to be between $10.000-$50.000 just to be certified and continuously validated. For forest conservation projects, certification can cost over $100,000.
[Read more: Fees Gold Standard: <https://globalgoals.goldstandard.org/fees/> and Verra https://verra.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Program-Fee-Schedule_v4.1.pdf]
The teams long term vision is:
[Read more about the vision here]
Challenges
Today the three largest challenges towards the vision and stopping climate change are:
- 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.
- No financial feasibility because of certification industry. Today, to remove carbon from the atmosphere, you need to be certified by an industry player which can cost approximately 70% of all potential profit from carbon credit sales. [http://www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/files/Offsetting_with_CDM_credits.pdf]
- No decentralized solution to support the change. There are no scalable solutions today to support the millions of people and organizations wanting to 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 proposal’s solution addresses the above challenges by developing an open and free for the validators be it a person, organization or company to document and prove their effort for improving the environment and remove carbon. The revenue model will be based on companies paying for verified carbon credits. The solution will be part of multi layers of decentralized validation of the work done by the organizations through self-reporting, external validators, satellite earth health monitoring and expert reviews.
It is important to stress that all relevant data will be documented on the Cardano blockchain and made freely and openly available online to everyone to investigate.
In this proposal two different use cases will be supported. The first use case is focused on the health of forest conservation in Ivory Coast and the second use case is focused on farmland health in Ghana.
We are excited about both use cases as they provide a great pilot locations including:
- An identified issue
- Local community members involvement
- NGO engagement
- Connection to companies wishing to mitigate their Carbon (providing a business model)
- Can then be duplicated to other locations
1. use case: Forest conservation health
In collaboration with The Forest Conservation Fund (https://www.fundforests.org/) who are today working with local partners to conserve the Tanoe Ehy forest in Ivory Coast for biodiversity and carbon removal, we will be building the solution, testing and proving the value of the solution.
Here is a link to more information about the Forest Conservation Fund
Here is a link for more information about the project
The first part of the solution will be based on satellite images which will be enhanced using AI and machine learning to calculate the health of the forest. Health will be defined by different metrics like; vegetation index, temperature, reflective spectrum, cloud cover and more.The technology and health metrics have already been developed and proven by our team member Yosef Akhtman over the last 20 years from experience within the remote sensing industry and as a university professor. The forest health results will be visualized and shared open and free online and documented on the Cardano blockchain.
The second part of the solution is on the ground knowledge. Team members from The Forest Conservation Fund’s local partners and community members will be equipped with a smartphone app for documenting key activities, data points and documentation. Part of the solution is to develop a first compliance framework for the data needed to be collected to validate the earth health results from the satellite. Data could be forest vegetation documentation, historic documentation on forest changes, biodiversity documentation, future expected forest changes and validating irregularities in satellite earth health results. The data collected by the The Forest Conservation Fund will be documented on the Cardano blockchain and be part of calculating the final earth health result which are open and freely available to everyone.
2. use case: Farmland health
For the second use case we are collaborating with the NGO The Pond Foundation (<https://thepondfoundation.org/>) and consumer food company WhatIF Foods (<https://whatif-foods.com/>) who are currently building new regenerative agricultural supply chains within northern Ghana for supplying bamboa groundnut to produce plant-based milk and noodles to the US market. The collaboration will enable us to work closely with farmers on the ground in Ghana supported by The Pond Foundations team members.
More details about the project
As the previous use case described above, the first part of the solution will be based on the satellite earth health technology which will need to be fitted to measure farmland which is in the process of transitioning from traditional farming to regenerative farming. The goal is to be able to document the health improvements of the soil and any other findings openly and freely available to everyone online to see.
The second part of the validation of the lands health will be done by the Pond Foundations team members using a smartphone app. The exact data to be collected will be investigated within the proposal but core data points like; land boarders, crops, farming practices, farming progress, identities etc. are expected to be important.
More info on the general project here: <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pFIlHzkOQOsRZGTTo4MQIk1sM6bAGtTMolr25Y1PC5c/edit#>
Value for customers and users
The goal of these two use cases is to lay the groundwork for proving social and environmental impact through radical transparency. Every expert, journalist, government, NGO, entrepreneur and interested person will be able to have free access to the same foundation of knowledge.
The customers of the solution will have a free way to prove their good work to the world and become compliant to sell carbon removal credits generated from their project. Users of the earth health data will for the first time have free access to data on the health of the earth and live projects.
Through those solutions companies mitigating their carbon will be able to analyze past performance of the projects and ongoing impact of their support. This transparency could lead to supporting more impactful projects and adjusting projects which does not have impact and reducing the “green washing economy” to an impactful one. While Cardano being the center datapoint for the validation.
Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.
The solution will create a massive amount of awareness around the Cardano blockchain and the Cardano community by creating the first fully transparent solution for measuring the health of the earth and enabling everyone to take action to stop climate change.
The solution addresses the challenge within the following areas. Increasing the CO2 sequestered by enabling more organizations to start removing carbon and proving it. Stop unintentional damaging habits by farmers when growing their crops in a traditional way and start to sequester CO2 by using regenerative practices. Scaling and supporting forest conservation will not only sequester more CO2 it will also preserve the forests’ biodiversity and uphold local environmental ecosystems for local farmers.
By showing the soli health over the last 10 years leading to transparency and traceability of soil health and forest conservation that will be crucial to continue and support projects which are making an impact and evaluate projects which are not. It will help to channel resources and efforts in an effective way and will be essential for nation governance systems which is a key part of the challenge setting.
The solution will also have the potential to bring end-consumers and on the ground farmers and forest conservation projects closer to each other. This will eliminate the need for today's middlemen who take 60% of the profit from carbon removal credits as well as for crops with the existing agricultural food supply chain.
In many developing countries which is a prime focus for Cardano, agriculture is the prime occupation and land health has massive implications for local solutions that are connected to:
- Marketplaces
- Nation governance systems - New governance systems for nation-states
- Environment - Solutions that help to solve environmental issues
- Many others - agri supply chains, carbon markets, micro finance, government subsidies for agriculture
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: The satellite technology for this proposal have already be proven, but because it relies on ingestion and assimilation of heterogeneous multi-modal environmental data from multiple sources and data providers who could update or change their offering reliability could be a risk which has to be taken into account by carefully planning of performance monitoring and maintenance mechanisms.
Challenge 2: The local validators working with the forest conservation communities and the Ghanian farmers, are not able to document the data needed for proving the land conditions and therefore the carbon removal effort. We believe this is unlikely since we have already spoken to the local validators who have interacted with the farmers and communities on multiple occasions and they are very cooperative.