Why is it important?
Legacy systems have failed us on climate change! This is Cardanos opportunity to demonstrate that it can build regenerative, better systems
What does success look like?
Climate Change impact has been significantly reduced by successfully nurturing and completing Catalyst Projects now and in the long term
Key Metrics to measure
Co2 impact estimation (direct and indirect)
Number of quality-proposals (measured by CAs - Auditability, Feasibility, Impact)
Funded proposals with measurable sustainable development goals
sustainable products and their positive impact
Challenge brief
This is a challenge that helps Projects on their mission to demonstrate that Cardano can allocate resources aligned with a specific interest or greater good which has been neglected by the traditional System for decades now. The best way to fight greenhouse gasses is by reducing energy-consumption. But this is not enough, we need to make the Cardano ecosystem Climate Positive; if achieved, the World will be a more regenerative, better place. We should incentivize that with at least a small % of our collective Potential.
What began as a challenge, has turned into a community: Cardano4Climate
While holding weekly meetups for 6 month now we have engaged with many different proposers and projects. Last funding round as a community, we have identified [1]many proposals already that were closely related to this challenge and we invited many more to the [2]sustainability event that we hold continuously now.
When talking about the fundamentals of Climate Change itself we would like to encourage you to read up on the papers and the official reports. We specifically refer to the [3]IPCC reports (we also linked a shorter and easier to read press-release in the links section):
"GENEVA, Aug 9 – Scientists are observing changes in the Earth's climate in every region and across the whole climate system, according to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report, released today. Many of the changes observed in the climate are unprecedented in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, and some of the changes already set in motion—such as continued sea level rise—are irreversible over hundreds to thousands of years."
"The report projects that in the coming decades climate changes will increase in all regions. For 1.5°C of global warming, there will be increasing heat waves, longer warm seasons and shorter cold seasons. At 2°C of global warming, heat extremes would more often reach critical tolerance thresholds for agriculture and health, the report shows."
"Stabilizing the climate will require strong, rapid, and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and reaching net zero CO2 emissions. Limiting other greenhouse gasses and air pollutants, especially methane, could have benefits both for health and the climate"
How will this challenge provide a springboard for Cardano adoption?
The green-movement is bigger than ever and companies like Tesla are immensely popular and successful not because they make cars that accelerate faster, but because their electric and therefore environmentally friendly cars are clearly one very important piece of the puzzle when it comes to preventing climate change. If we had to take a wild guess as to what one of the other pieces of the puzzle could be, we would propose looking into better governance systems for example. By having experiments on the topic of climate change, not only will Catalyst contribute to preventing climate change but also position Cardano as the green blockchain of the future and hopefully Catalyst will learn about how to deal with such urgent and tough problems.
How will this challenge advance Cardano's mission?
If we can't build Systems that are better than our traditional Systems, what are we doing here? We could go back to central banks and governing classes. How to better prove that Cardano is a worthwhile endeavor to the young, the governments, the people than by showing our commitment and contribution to the environment.
Guiding questions
What will have the greatest impact on climate change in the short and long term?
What real-world regenerative solutions already exist that would benefit from applications developed on the Cardano blockchain now, and in the near future?
How can we incentivize individuals, local communities, councils and municipal authorities, businesses and governments to prioritize taking action to reduce our overall greenhouse gas footprint?
What are the most useful and scalable applications to put Cardano at the forefront of real, actionable solutions which reduce the greenhouse gasses we will pass on to future generations?
How can we minimize Cardano's greenhouse gasses further or even become Climate positive?
Proposal success metrics:
How big is the impact on Cardano's self-sustainability?
How big is the impact on greenhouse gasses (Co2, …)?
How big is the impact on regenerating our planet?
How big is the awareness that will be created?
Is your proposal financially sustainable after funding?
Budget rationale
Obviously this is not a Climate Fund, but having a small percentage being used for exploration on how Cardano can help solve this wicket problem is really the minimum we can do given the urgency of the issue now and the long time it took for it to finally be recognized by the mainstream.
Links
Join our Community!
<https://linktr.ee/Cardano4Climate>
Press release on IPCC-report:
<https://www.ipcc.ch/2021/08/09/ar6-wg1-20210809-pr/>
<https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/climate-change/>
References
[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1w89O_6R-sqd9WmCTttdaUtwAenckJlZt1nJT2LmatQY/edit#gid=0
[2] https://www.meetup.com/de-DE/Cardano-Catalyst-Community-Network/events/jqqjqsyccqbtb
