Detailed Plan
Problem Statement:
We need to reforest 90m hectares of land (an area twice the size of Sweden) within the next 10 years to achieve the goal of staying within 1.5 degree increase and risking the entire balance of the global climate (at the most optimistic level).*
Huge forestry projects are tapping institutional investors to fund the necessary acceleration needed to reverse deforestation and reforest the globe. We estimate $900bn is needed to reforest this 90m hectares. The same ROI principles used to entice investors to commit funding can also be used to incentivise the public to join in. However they are currently unable to enter this space as the ticket entry is too high.
Solution:
We need not only a blend of tens of thousands of large projects (being carried out by companies like www.terraformation.com where Jeremy works) but also to empower millions of smaller projects globally to reach the scale needed. Until the tech became available, it has been impossible to validate small holder farms and communities who want to contribute - but now the tech can help us do this with reliable components that are needed to help this scale by embedding the financial incentives to create a sustainable economic ecosystem for reforestation.
There are two ways of doing this, one of them has been solved by www.regen.network who have created a token based system for buying and selling carbon credits produced by large reforestation projects. Businesses looking to offset their carbon emissions can purchase the tokens. The blockchain acts as a way of embedding immutable data on the reforestation projects to qualify the projects have validated the claims they have made about the planting they have done and how much it has been valued at. There will inevitably be many more similar platforms as this over time.
The other way of doing it is to look at trees as having sovereignty - and treating them individually. First of all, when a tree is planted, it is registered by the planter using an app Treetracker by Greenstand whom we’ve partnered with (https://greenstand.org/treetracker/treetrackers). When a planter logs a tree, they are immediately paid from the money made by the sale of our NFTree. We can make sure that planters all over the world are paid a fair and equitable wage by building this into the smart contract.
When someone buys a newly minted NFTree, This not only allows the average person to become an investor in a tree, but it can support millions of smaller projects that wouldn’t qualify as a big project. We propose a platform that can automate the certification of a small tree planting project through a blend of satellite data (GIS remote sensing at certain resolutions), smart phones capturing images of trees being planted and their continual health and growth, and mid level drones between filling in missing data. This data, along with other inputs like species, time stamps, geolocation, and the knowledge of other trees and their health in the vicinity, will give us the data needed to evaluate its carbon credit value. Which can be sold collectively in the voluntary carbon market. Providing an ROI for the people who helped pay to plant it.
This data will be stored on the blockchain and associated to each individual tree which through smart contracts, will have its own economic incentives for people to take care of it and ensure its survival - think of Tesla self driving cars being able to earn money from collecting passengers, and pay for their own fuel/electricity when they need to go charge up. This is the same but for trees who can’t go anywhere, so we need people to go to them!
By building a marketplace where certified tree planting projects can sell planted trees, we can invite citizens to support the reforestation of the planet AND benefit in the economic upside of carbon capture.
So far we have done research into what is needed and verified that all the tools we need are available to make this happen. We’ve partnered with www.Space4Good.com to provide remote sensing data, and Treetracker who have API for gathering field data with planters. We’ll work with project certification companies like Verra and Gold Standard to maintain high quality reforestation projects. As well as Terraformation who can give us advice on best practices.
Arturo has also built a first version product on Cardano blockchain with a smart contract to mint an NFTree, and the first version basic marketplace to buy and sell the NFTrees.
Roadmap:
3 months: Build MVP
6 months: First pilot complete, validated that citizens can buy real NFTrees in our marketplace
We expect to soft launch this by June 2022 with a working version.
12 months: Working product with several reforestation projects and a secondary marketplace for buying and selling NFTrees functional.
Breakdown of costs:
The investment needed will be to create a first working prototype integrating partner software to create a robust product. We estimate this to be around $50,000 based on Jeremy’s work building apps and websites in one of his previous companies that he sold. We’ll need a front end and back end engineer to both work with Arturo Panach (Cardano and smart contracts) to build the marketplace and integrate API functionality for adding the data needed to validate a tree and mint it. As well as a data scientist to help set up and manage our databases. Jeremy will design the wireframe, UI/UX, and graphics for the website as well as manage partnerships and marketing.
Front-end: $8,400
Back-end: $12,300
Data scientist: $4,300
Arturo Panach: $10,000
Jeremy Agnew: $10,000
Hosting and other associated costs for platform development: $5,000
Total: £50,000