2019 Necker Blockchain Summit — The Can’t Wait Climate Crisis
By: The Bitfury Group
Tags: Leadership, Climate Change, Blockchain Summit, Bitfury, Technology

2019 Necker Blockchain Summit — The Can’t Wait Climate Crisis

Expressing varied levels of alarm at the current threats posed by climate change, leading global activists told the Blockchain Summit on Necker Island yesterday that blockchain technology is helping them address some of the most pressing problems.

“We’re looking to these new technologies that have the ability to provide some kind of a system,” said Racquel Moses, CEO of the Caribbean Climate-Smart Accelerator.

“One of the ways that people are seeing blockchain feeding into climate action is to record the changes taking place because a lot of what is happening is we’re not very clear about how much progress are we making against the objectives that we set and whether any of those objectives are working,” she added.

Gigi Brisson, founder and CEO of Ocean Elders, praised a tuna traceability program that the World Wildlife Fund is currently leading in Fiji.

“The fish comes out of the water, and it’s RFID tagged,” said Brisson, referring to a type of tracking system that uses smart barcodes in order to identify items. “It gets processed into pieces with a QR code, and this not only starts to equalize the imbalance of where the dollars go in that chain, more goes to the fishers and early participants. But it also eliminates illegal fishing, where there’s a lot of slavery. It’s active and it’s working.”

Brisson also cited a company called Plastic Bank, which has a market where they exchange plastic for cash or a digital coin, or items.

“They gather the plastic, and they resell it at a little higher price so they make a margin. It’s identified so they know it’s within the system. There are families that are supporting themselves on the collection of plastic. It’s an active and successful application.”

Moses is working with the company Bitt, which is trying to digitize currency across the Caribbean. “One of the first things that happens after a disaster is you have no access to resources, you have no access to buy the basic supplies that you need,” Moses said. “So in working with these governments to get the currency digitized, it creates an opportunity for resilience. That is a potential adaption project. We’re trying to get some new governments on board.

While panelists said the climate crisis is clearly reaching a point of no return, they also warned against panic-induced inertia.

“The biggest thing is inertia. We have to keep moving, we have to make progress. we have to keep working. We really need people to stay tuned in,” Moses said.

“It’s easy to panic, and to have that panic allow you to do nothing,” she added. “I’m very optimistic about this challenge, which is hard to do. But we have to be able to see them as manageable problems, so people don’t just take a fatalistic approach and tune out. we have to be able to provide information to the population as. Well as the governments.”

Katie Hunt-Morr, Director of Community at Virgin Unite, agreed that governments will be key.

“The governments are going to be the make or break,” she said. “So the issue is, how do we get people to the polls in an informed way and educate them about climate. It’s viewed as a political issue — it is not. It is not jobs versus the climate.”