On blockchain and fair-trade carbon credits

EcologyScience

Aug 30

An open letter to Verra

Hi Verra,

I'm an MD-technologist, I've been working in high-tech for over ten years. Eventually, I created a consulting company for high-IQ individuals to solve hard scientific and social problems using emerging solutions. We called it Delinquent Savants.

I started a project for fair-trade carbon credits. But I didn't set out to work in the carbon market — or to use blockchain. I set out to solve a problem.

Taita Fernando — Fernando, a project initiator and Taita from Putumayo Colombia
© Zach Zublena at Savimbo.com

Three medicine doctors approached me who live in the Colombian Amazon. They heard our agency solved unsolvable problems. They asked me to switch their remote economy from deforestation to conservation. I didn't know how, but I set out to learn.

I discovered, after looking at similar Verra projects in the region, that we could pay local smallfarmers three times more for carbon sequestration than they made selling cows for the same hectarage. The problem is, that the Verra certification pipeline is so massive, and rigorous, and involved they had no hope of doing the certifying. But they didn't want outside validators on their land. So we began to train them. Silviculture, land papers, documentation of conservation, cultivation, and planting. But as you know — that's the easy part.

No one was willing to do business with them at first. The digital divide was too large, and everyone lacked cultural competency. We needed trustless protocols, so we taught them drone photogrammetry, GPS, an on-the-ground ML that differentiates between selectively-logged and native jungle, and how to document animal species without disturbing them. And we started doing the hard paperwork required for certifying a credit.

They said we were the first environmentalists who had ever come to their jungle — and there were many — that had ever given them even $1 for planting a tree.

So they taught us about the intricate lifecycles of hundreds of trees. Information I can't find in any silviculture or ecology database. They wanted their traditional knowledge documented in photographs and international English. And they went to their people, and one by one they came to us with small plots and big dreams. They got bank accounts and land papers. They sent me photographs of jaguar tracks and their forests. They changed, they wanted to change. And the Government of Colombia did too. They assigned me a silviculture expert, and a translator free of charge, and asked for an industrial biochar machine for the city center.

Other people heard what I am doing, in Thailand, Bolivia, Brazil, Uganda, the Congo, and Nepal. It spread like wildfire through the indigenous groups and the people who help them. They heard I don't pay any middlemen, only the farmers directly. And the clients came. An aluminum company, aerospace startups, small businesses in the US who want to go green, Hollywood film studios, and the sheik of a middle-eastern nation.

The thing is Verra, we can't do it without you. We need your stamp of approval and your expertise so our clients can trust us, use us, and we can scale. And the problem is, we also can't do it without blockchain. Our clients want to know where their carbon sequestration came from. They want to know that a farmer changed his life with their support and they are actually moving the dial. They don't want to buy a carbon future of unknown provenance on the international exchange and learn John Oliver doesn't like it. They want origin stories.

I want something more complex. I want my farmers to receive some of the revenue that comes from their products. I see my farmers planting trees by hand, and I see their love for the forests. Then I see international markets and the brokers making 80-90% of the profits of carbon credits from a cushy office building in the center of New York. I see what that money can do to restore the forests in the Amazon, to stop 300-year-old trees from being logged. I want my farmers to have a share in their credit when it sells, and I want to sell it directly to companies that have to prove emissions reductions.

We are not a nonprofit, we are a farming collective and this international crop is worth something. I need blockchain for two things. I need it to help me with transactions. Thousands of farmers are needed to reduce the emissions of one large corporation. I need to track shared ownership of credits through very complex interactions, and across a long period of time. One carbon credit takes years to transit the certification pipeline.

My clients will pay a deposit on the credit before it's certified, and buy it when the paperwork is finished, but we don't want to release it from our pipeline until it's officially retired in the Verra database. Because until then, it still has value — and I want my farmers to have a share in that value because they did the work.

This can be done with regular software, and if Verra rules against Web3 — we will do it with regular software. But it's much easier to buy, sell, and track commodities like this with blockchain. We have no interest in trading offsets and inflating the prices, in some hyped-up Web3 pump-and-dump. We are willing to do the critical and labor-intensive tasks of certification. And we ask Verra to examine blockchain technology, not for what it has done, but for what it could do.

We hope you can see the economic potential in the technology to enable shared profits for subsistence farmers in tropical forests, who have the most potential to truly move the dial for our planet. We need their effort and ingenuity, and ownership of the problem.

I'm determined to work with Verra, and I can take or leave blockchain for our projects if it's an either/or. But it would help me immensely. Please work with me on this one.

Drea Burbank, MD

CEO @ Savimbo

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