There is a beautiful future that lies in the great-in-between, where our economic, ecological and societal systems are one and in harmony. While rhetoric paints a rosy picture, the reality is marred by policy failures and a looming climate emergency. One of the biggest challenges in deploying, accelerating, and traversing towards a sustainable- or dare I say regenerative, future has been a pervasive lack of imagination. This currently leads to solutions only being designed to fit within the status quo. Technology, often hailed as the magic wand of progress, has yet to fully deliver on its promises. To truly forge a new future, we must move beyond familiar solutions that merely uphold the status quo. For too long technology has been seen as the brute-force deus-ex-machina humanity needs to maintain the course, and has not been used as a coordinating and facilitation tool towards societal realignment and thriving.
Reimagination towards Regeneration
Regenerative Finance aims to be a force for reimagination. Regenerative Finance or ReFi amalgamates Digital Ledger Technologies (Blockchain), regenerative practices and cooperative economics and coordination in order to design glocal (both local and global) socio-technological infrastructures that can restore ecosystems, combat climate change and improve the world. The ReFi movement was born as a love-child of crypto-enthusiasts, developers, activists and technologists trying to apply the principles of crypto-economics, permaculture and alternative economic models to their own real-world and digital communities. Through collaborations, community projects and financial decentralized endeavors they are taking on the world’s largest crises.
Blockchain Technology provides Open and Transparent Accounting, Measurement and Verification
The introduction of DLT technology has created a vast global, decentralized, and transparent network of transactions that are all able to be verified through Proof of Work, proof of Stake and other calculation models. The transparency and verifiability of blockchain technology allows it to be used as a way of tracing and tracking the origins, state, and validity of transactions. Emission reduction strategies like carbon credits and offsets have been rightfully criticized for their lack of transparency. This past May, leading carbon credit provider Verra, was rocked by a scandal that alleges that a huge chunk of their offsets are worthless. Blockchain technology solves this by creating traceable carbon credits that cannot be resold once used. Regenerative Finance projects like Toucan Protocol are creating credits that can be retired in a transparent way. Furthermore, Blockchain technology provides a tool to visualize and verify supply chains which can have a humongous impact on mapping and combatting human rights abuses, corruption and ecological malfeasance.
Tokenization of Nature-backed Assets
Many Regenerative Finance projects design and create nature backed digital assets. These are digital twins of ecosystems and real world assets whose data and natural state are made transparent, measurable and verifiable through blockchain technology. The value of these assets can then be mirrored and tokenized in the crypto-world. In this way the economic value of natural ecosystems is revealed and made clear in the financial world. I specifically say reveal, because I want to remove the frame that that tokenization is merely a tool for speculatory financialization of nature. Our current economic order is based on the misalignment of rewards, costs and incentives. Our society rewards the accumulation of profit and wealth above and beyond the health of our ecosystems, our communities and individuals. In certain aspects, destroying ecosystems, extracting fossil fuels from the earth, and destroying the lives of people is actively and disproportionately rewarded. We incentivize degeneration. Our collective fictional narrative is that wealth can exist at the expense of that which sustains our existence, namely, the air, our water, our families, and our trees. Last year oil companies made a record 200 billion dollars in global profits in spite of the disastrous impact the oil industry has on the carbon budget and people's lives. In this imaginary economic system financial profit can coexist with biodiversity loss, climate weirding and life-loss. Regenerative Finance asserts that economic models should be founded and backed by what has true value and that this value needs to be accounted for in a fair and transparent manner and in a way that cultivates and regenerates the underlying assets. Through tokenization, Refi develops monetary vehicles that incentivize the regeneration of ecosystems and communities while placing them as key stores of value.
Participatory Economics and Community Governance and Benefits
Blockchain technology and crypto communities center values like decentralization, autonomy, and coordination. Through digital communities called Decentralized Autonomous Organizations web3-natives allocate, govern, and deploy resources in service of a common goal. These DAO’s mirror a long list of real world initiatives that attempt to coordinate and incentivize deep community cooperation and solidarity in service of a common goal. From mutual aid groups, activist groups to cooperatives, DAO’s affirm and enact digital governance through democratic means and govern themselves in sovereign ways in service of their goals. Now, this does not mean that they are utopias. In fact many DAO’s govern themselves in service of profit maximization to the detriment of nature or community and the crypto-industry has been afflicted with extremely problematic, cultish, and greed filled actors and incidents. Nevertheless, the tools in themselves can be used for good and are consistently being tested and tried towards the developments of collective goods. Projects like Regen Network, Grassroots Economics, and Kolektivo are leading the pack in creating, implementing, and executing digital-led circular socio-technological economic models centered around community resilience. Celo and Opera’s newly launched Minipay system integrates a stable-coin web3 wallet in the Opera-mini browser, thereby providing payment infrastructure to hundreds of millions of people in the Global South who are unbanked while also on-boarding them into the Celo ecosystem. Web3 technology provides digital infrastructure that is helping marginalized communities and areas leapfrog to the future.
The Next Frontier for Regenerative Development
Ultimately, DLT technology is a decentralized governance tool that can accelerate and facilitate many of the coordination problems we face within the sustainability field whether that is the retirement of carbon credits, the valuation of natural capital, or the verification of ethical supply-chains. Nevertheless, this technology is only worth as much as it provides actual benefit to both ecological systems and communities. Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology have received a lot of bad rep because of the widespread existence of scams, cultish behaviors, and the wild west-everyone for themselves ethos. Not to mention the negative impact that some specific blockchain ledgers have due to the amount of energy used by the Proof of Work model.
In contrast to this, we are seeing value-first eco-friendly blockchain ecosystems like Celo, Cosmos, Filecoin and Hedera creating and innovating towards actual use-cases that improve people’s lives and regenerate the planet. As we stand on the brink of a technological revolution, it's crucial to harness blockchain's potential responsibly. That this article might serve as a starting point for experimenting with Web3 in your own sustainability pursuit.
About the Author
Changemaker, Speaker, Social Innovator, Creative, Activist, Futurist. Just some of the words used to describe Gilberto Morishaw. With diverse experience leading impact communities and movements, Gilberto brings his unique vision on how we can change the world. With a keen interest in policy and its role to create the conditions which enable people to make positive change, Gilberto pushes us to reinvent how we see the world now to move towards the future we are trying to create.
He is Head of Impact, Equity, and Inclusion at Kolektivo, President of the Supervisory Board of OCAN (advocacy bureau for the Dutch Caribbean), Member of the Board of Trustees of Krijger & Partners, John Lewis Senior Fellow at Humanity in Action, Global Shaper at the World Economic Forum, Climate Reality Leader and also an Partnerships Manager for the African Caribbean Pacific Young Professionals Network.
Gilberto believes in the power that every individual has to make a difference in the world that they are in through empathy and radical love. We are at the precipice of a new future and the Trans-Atlantic Union must play a key role towards the economic and social transition necessary to guarantee a just and equitable future for all.
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