Please describe your proposed solution.
The massive problem
The voluntary carbon industry take 80-70% of carbon credit revenue from the project owners who are doing the work on the ground!
“It shows that for every £10 a buyer spends
with a carbon offsetting retailer using CERs, £2.76 typically goes to setting up and running the
project. For a statutory buyer dealing direct with brokers, £3.06 from every £10 typically goes to
the environmental project.”
Research: http://www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/files/Offsetting_with_CDM_credits.pdf
The process of setting 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.
[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 large carbon projects a rapidly growing and the global voluntary carbon market is estimated to be more then $100bn by 2030
Read more: https://trove-research.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Trove-Research_Scale-of-VCM_29-Oct-2020-2.pdf
Read more: <https://www.ft.com/content/8ed608b2-25c8-48d2-9653-c447adbd538f>
The teams long term vision is:
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 cost approximately 70% of all potential profit from carbon credit sales.
- No decentralized 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 above challenges by distributing knowledge on carbon removal and certify the farmers work in a cheap and scalable way.
The initial solution is free to use mobile app for an NGO’s team members to engage with local farmers on how to incorporate carbon removing farming practices to increase the farming yield, remove more carbon and to generate a new income.
The first use case will be working with the NGO called The Pond Foundation and 20-30 ghanaian farmers on how to make biochar (carbon sink from plants) and use it as soil fertilization while removing carbon. The app will be focused on registering the land of the farmers, documenting the status of the land, documenting the project type (in this case it will be either transforming into using biochar as fertilizer for the land or selecting land for forest conservation) and monthly updating progress. Since very few of the farmers have smartphones the app will be build to specifically support the NGO team member in selecting only the relevant data as smooth as possible based on knowledge from scientific research on what is important for having a real impact on climate change.
All data relevant to compliance will be stored on the Cardano blockchain for everyone to review.
Testing oven for producing biochar from rice husk in Tamale, Ghana.
Link to how biochar removes carbon: <https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo395>
More info on the general project here: <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pFIlHzkOQOsRZGTTo4MQIk1sM6bAGtTMolr25Y1PC5c/edit#>
Value for customers and users
The app will enable the farmer to be transparent and compliant within carbon removal and earn an additional income. The app will enable the NGO team to support a huge amount of farmers to be compliant and therefore an even greater climate impact.
Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.
The challenge ask the question: What dapps, products and integrations can be implemented to bring impactful use cases to Cardano ecosystem that help drive more adoption? Than it goes describing various sectors including: marketplaces, nation governance systems and environment. This proposal address all of the above.
In addition it build a dapp for a massive problem in Africa in general as well as in the country we are working in. Ghana has a population of 25.37 million […] with 68 % and 32 % living in the rural and urban areas respectively. About 52 % of the labor force is engaged in agriculture….. Approximately, 39 % of farm labor force is women. Agriculture contributes to 54 % of Ghana’s GDP, and accounts for over 40 % of export earnings, while at the same time providing over 90 % of the food needs of the country. Ghana’s agriculture is predominantly smallholder, traditional and rain-fed (SRID, 2001). Source: <https://www.fao.org/ghana/fao-in-ghana/ghana-at-a-glance/en/>
This solution will directly impact small farmer livelihood and the environment by amount of CO2 sequestered because of the increased adoption biochar as fertilization of the farmers soil, the of using artificial fertilizer will be stopped and the new sustainable way of fertilizing the soil will be the beginning of a local revolution using biochar. This solution will increase number of CO2 sequestered, increase awareness and increase the number of people changing an environmentally damaging habit.
All if the above is done considering a business model to enable scale. In fact both verification services in supply chains as well as carbon markets already includes supply finance opportunity - however most of the finance does not reach the “boots on the ground” and this is what this proposals is aiming to change.
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: Scalability in data gathering with farmers and making the app easy to use and fast enough for one person to support hundreds of farmers long term. Our strategy to mitigate this challenge is to build the app in close collaboration with farmers, NGOs and carbon removal experts to make sure we are razor focused on functionality that have impact.
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.
To mitigate both issues we are also collaborating with a company (off taker) www.whatiffood.com who will both mitigate its carbon through the process as well work with us on innovative business models to consider scalability.
Challenge 3: Localization, understating local systems and culture are a challenge. To mitigate it the project is collaborating directly with local team on the ground as well having the support of WADA.org which has a strong presence in Ghana.