impactChoice Solutions for the NAE: Carbon Mitigation
By: Allan Saunders
Tags: Ethereum, Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Blockchain, Environment

At impactChoice, the parent company behind the Natural Asset Exchange (NAE) and EARTH Token project, we have been serving custom-built solutions to our clients in the environmental sustainability industry since 2009.

Carbon Mitigation is one of three in-house solutions that impactChoice will be making available on the NAE from day one. We will go over the other two, namely Climate Neutral Fuel and Waste-to-Energy, in subsequent posts. To understand more about the challenges of carbon mitigation, see our overview on carbon mitigation where we discuss the problem in depth and give you the required background for putting our solution in context.

In this post, we take a closer look at our first use case for this solution in the hotel industry, we look at how this solution can be applied to other business models, and we also look at how the solution can be plugged into the NAE and what the implications are on trade and environmental impact.

An Elegant Solution

One of the biggest hurdles faced when trying to recruit companies and organizations to participate in voluntary carbon mitigation schemes is the initial upfront cost of purchasing natural assets. Even if companies make the leap, they are then faced with adding the cost of purchase into the pricing of their products or services in order to recoup their expenditure and this can price them out of competitive markets.

At impactChoice, we pioneered an environmentally sustainable Carbon Mitigation solution that is cost neutral to these companies and organizations. Instead of purchasing a natural asset in whole upfront, our solution provides these companies with granularity and access to purchasing a portion of a natural asset which is split and divided into many parts. It can then be parceled and packaged into the product or service the company or organization is providing. This granular purchase can then be added to the product or service at the point of sale — and in effect be paid by the customer.

When applied, it allows companies, businesses, and other organizations a cost-neutral method of becoming facilitators in partial Carbon Asset purchasing. They act as a direct bridge between their end clients and natural asset providers. This solution removes the upfront cost of voluntary participation in carbon mitigation schemes, while still allowing businesses and organizations the chance to participate in carbon mitigation and offer a benefit to the environment.

More recently, we took our solution one step further and instead of running it on an internal database, we developed the world’s first carbon asset management platform that is underpinned by a blockchain. Our private permissioned distributed ledger technology has been in operation since April of 2017 and is what we have been internally providing to our clients. The same elegant design can be applied to the NAE on an open, publicly verifiable and transparent permissioned blockchain.

Applying the Carbon Mitigation Solution to the NAE

impactChoice’s Carbon Mitigation solution can, and will, be deployed on the Natural Asset Exchange. We have test piloted it with a select few hotels in Africa and with the NAE’s global reach, the global hotel industry can come on board.

Beyond hotels, the very same solution can be applied to other customer-facing sectors of the global economy in a cost neutral way by including the cost of carbon mitigation directly into the price. Individuals and corporations will then be offered a direct choice in acting in a way that is environmentally sustainable. Those that do will receive unique certificates that are registered on the blockchain and, depending on the which projects the vendor uses, they can even become aware of which particular environmental projects they have assisted with.

It is our firm belief that people like doing the right thing by the environment. We also acknowledge that one of the main stumbling blocks for getting businesses and organizations to participate in carbon mitigation schemes is the initial upfront costs they need to later recoup. Our clients have been able to overcome this obstacle when applying our carbon mitigation solution and they have achieved phenomenal results. Extending this solution to the NAE will allow an even bigger penetration into the market, bring more businesses and organizations on board, and the results can be replicated globally. By removing one of the main barriers to participation we expect to foster more demand for environmental projects globally.

Look out for our next posts where we will be examining real-world industry use cases for our carbon mitigations solutions.