Walid Al Saqqaf, Founder of Insureblocks and CEO & Co-Founder of Rebalance Earth joins us in this podcast to discuss the role blockchain has in fighting climate change but also the impact it can have in regenerating biodiversity. In a world that is increasingly threatened by the challenges of climate change, ecosystem destruction, and the 6th mass extinction, carbon credits and carbon offsetting markets seem ill equipped to face them. The markets are plagued by a lack of transparency and a number middlemen here to make a quick buck, can blockchain, AI and Internet of Things along with keystone species like African Forest Elephants provide an answer?

 
What is blockchain?
Bruce Pon, co-founder of Ocean Protocol, mentioned blockchain as this “general purpose technology” like the steam engine during the industrial revolution. Now everyone will tell you that blockchain is a distributed database that removes the need for intermediaries and that has immutable or tamper proof properties.

From the perspective of Rebalance Earth, Walid looks at blockchain from two perspectives, a short term and a long term one:

On a short term it is a technology that allows for the transparent, traceable and trusted transfer of value, from firms and households wishing to rebalance themselves, to local communities that are here to safeguard keystone species like African Forest Elephants who perform the carbon offsetting services and the maintenance of whole biodiverse ecosystems.  All this in a transparent manner to avoid corruption and double counting.

From a long term perspective, we all know today that biodiversity is important. However we don’t have enough data to understand how important it is, and crucially how much it’s worth. To get the necessary amount of data to begin to understand biodiversity you need a very large number of actors around the world to share their data. This is where blockchain can come in, in the creation of a data marketplace that will facilitate the share of data to unlock the value of biodiversity

 
Rebalance Earth

Co-founded by startup founder, Walid Al Saqqaf, Assistant Director at the IMF, Ralph Chami, world renown conservationist Ian Redmond, along with 60 volunteers, Rebalance Earth is a purpose driven company whose aim is to re-imagine carbon offsetting as a mechanism to fund the protection of keystone species to promote and regenerate biodiversity. Other ecosystem services attributable to these species will follow as research reveals the value of their role in the ecosystem.

Biodiversity is the variety of life on earth in all its form and all its interactions.

A keystone specie is an organism that helps to define an entire ecosystem. It is one which has a disproportionately large effect on its natural environment relative to its population size. If that species dies an entire ecosystem risks collapsing. Equally if a keystone specie is reintroduced into an ecosystem it can reflourish. This is the case of what happened in the Yellowstone National Park when 31 wolves were reintrod...