Blockchain Technology and Digital Finance for Climate Action Empowerment Webinar

All of the work that's going on around SDG investment and financing, still very separated out. And you'll see in Marianne's video a little bit of the work that her alliance has done in trying to map the nexus between those sort of digital finance ecosystems at a national level and how they connect in to the SDG agenda and national priorities in those same countries. And then thirdly, the task force pointed, perhaps stratospherically, if you like, to some of the broader international governance issues, perhaps picking up on what now may seem like a hackneyed example, the case of Libra, but we could equally talk about other global digital currencies beginning to emerge. The task force asked the question, how can these large digital platforms that are benefiting from these scale effects of digitalization tend to lead to high levels of market concentration, perhaps even higher than some of the previous generation of banks? How do we govern those organizations with the SDGs in mind? Now, obviously we see right now a debate around Facebook as it relates to the US elections and many other sort of contentious pieces. But actually we can see in the discussions about Libra that really a very narrow lens has been taken in thinking about how initiatives such as that can be governed with a focus principally on financial stability, money laundering and competition policy. Important, certainly, but not really covering the broader scope of impacts that large digital finance platforms of that kind of might have on sustainable development in countries that they penetrate more deeply. So a set of opportunities, and I'll illustrate one in a second and then pass back to you, Christina, if I may, a whole lot of policies around what needs to happen at the ecosystem level. And I think the comments we just heard about where the EU is going is quite interesting because if anybody noticed that wonderful efficiency of the European Commission, they used to have something called a sustainable and fintech unit sitting within fisma, the Ministry of Finance equivalent. And then they split them into two at the most unfortunate moment and then decided to develop a sustainable finance strategy that had some digital in it and a digital finance strategy that had some sustainability in it. And again, it sort of speaks to this question of how you develop stuff at the national level. My one example that I wanted to give goes roughly like this. I think it's quite easy to point to individual financial innovations that digitally powered can lead to, should we say better financing SDG outcomes. But what really becomes interesting is when one thinks about broader digital ecosystem innovations. So if we take Bangladesh as a use case, and this will hopefully just take me a minute or so, they need to drive forward their sustainability agenda Something in the order of 60, 80 billion. 60 to 80 billion US dollars investment a year in, if you like, low carbon climate, resilient, inclusive infrastructure of many different kinds. I won't list that. Today they're managing to fund about 20% of that. And the bulk of funding is coming from international capital markets. So borrowing money on international capital markets, expensive, risky and so on. The innovation space that we looked at was what it would take using digital to harvest micro savings growing rapidly within Bangladesh. Channeling that and aggregating into larger investable pools suitably de risked for small savers and channeling those investments through the use of blockchain in more accountable ways into the construction of infrastructure. So if you like, three innovation stages that effectively disintermediates many of the existing financial institutions, reduces the need for international capital market access and delivers dividends not to J.P. morgan or the World bank, but delivers them to, if you like, that taxi driver in Dakar that is saving 20 cents a week. Why is this important? It's important even more so in the pandemic where we see a growing sovereign debt crisis for many developing countries as tax revenues collapse, economies get slowed down, exports aren't functioning properly anymore, and sovereign debt can't be serviced. And so for the foreseeable future, many developing countries will find it increasingly difficult to access international capital markets to finance sustainable development, infrastructure and other financing needs going forward. At the same time, over the last 20 years, global savings have increased from US$7 trillion a year to US$23.00 trillion. And in LDC is the poorest countries in the world, domestic savings have increased by a multiple of five over the same period. Digitalization, understood as an ecosystem of different innovations that are connected together, can not only deliver a little bit of this or a little bit of that, but can dramatically reshape the way in which countries can finance their long term development needs, can empower citizens who are saving increasingly to decide where that money should go and can deliver equity benefits because dividends are being paid to the poorest of the poor in those countries rather than channeling out of the country and going to large financial institutions. I hope, Christina, we have a chance to talk a little bit more about some of these. But each of these five of which I've described one we think describes an ecosystem shift supported by digitalization that can really change the way in which finance flows to support the SDGs. Thank you very much indeed.

Thank you very much, Simon. And we are definitely all looking forward to seeing how it will be implemented and what are the next steps and how will pandemic impact or give other opportunities to digitalization? Thank you very much. And now we are ready for the video from Marianne Haag from Sustainable Digital Finance Alliance.

Thank you very much. My name is Marianne. I'm the Executive Director of the Green Digital Finance Alliance. I'm extremely honored and pleased to be invited to address such an insightful audience. For climate finance to scale, we need game changing approaches. We don't only need digitization, we need carefully crafted digitization and we need digitization. 2.0 blockchain has the potential to unlock these game changing approaches, but only if we carefully design it to do so. So I will look at climate finance through the lens of blockchain over the next five to seven minutes. And in a nutshell, Blockchain is a distributed database that allows for the transfer of assets in a traceable distributed network. This change from centralized to decentralized data infrastructure is what enables us to create game changing approaches. What I will share with you is essentially three pathways that is informed by the work we have done in our knowledge partnership with the UN Task Force for Digital Financing of DSTGs, which you will hear much more about from Simon Cedig in a minute. I will look at three pathways today. One is how DLT can help to reshape the foundational data infrastructure that will allow us to scale climate finance products. Secondly, I will look at how it allows for climate finance instrument innovation and thirdly, how it how it allows us to define who actually is engaged in climate finance. So now firstly let's look at the data infrastructure. The 30% of global emissions are coming from our building sector. In the European Green deal there is talk about a retrofit renovation. And if you look at a lot of the national action plans for Covid green recovery, a lot of them have energy efficient and low carbon retrofit buildings as one of their top priorities for investment. That is because exactly those types of investments creates a lot of jobs. Now if I as a commercial real estate client or a residential real estate client today, sit out in my bank, the bank has to go to visit different jurisdictions, four other jurisdictions, five other jurisdictions, again eight different data spaces to get the data to be able to advise me through remote X ray of my building, what retrofits do I need to make? Is it the left wall that is leaking? Is it the roof? Is it the windows and the data to be able to model what is the payback time and also how much will my real estate increase in value with a change in energy label? You have to go to the real estate registry where data is only updated maybe once a year and by the owner itself. So is it credible? You will have to go to three different databases to buy data on energy used for water, for electricity and for heating in the building. You will have to go to buy very specific methodological data for that geolocation. Now if we put that data and layer it on a distributed database, we would be able to draw that data much faster and banks would be able and be incentivized to issue energy efficient mortgages. Also, because in a number of jurisdictions these data points are actually considered to be sensitive data, especially when it comes to your personal energy consumption. But by putting them on a DLT we can cryptographically protect them and you can with your key, authorize the bank to go in and find that data and leverage it for your benefit. So getting that data structure ready on a DLT is one of the prerequisites for really unlocking that renovation way that the politicians are talking about. Secondly, let's look at capital market instruments. We actually did a study on the digitization of green bonds together with HSBC about a year ago and at that point in time we saw basically a few bonds that had entered the markets and it was mainly only the sales and distribution process and putting in the bids that were digitized on a dlt. What you see on the slide is the world's first transaction on a blockchain of a sustainability linked bond which was the World bank together with the banking partner CBA in Australia in 2018. And you see the transaction on the slide. So there were seven institutional investors that put in their bid. The book building happened in front of everybody's in full transparency automated. The payments of the coupons were not done on chain and mainly because of regulatory barriers of token taxation in Australia. So what has happened since 2018? Well, Indonesia issued a green retail sukuk last year with 50% of the investors being millennials. So so that they are able to finance climate infrastructure using domestic savings so they can improve their credit rating and not having to be dependent on capital markets. This was not however issued on the dlt, but this year we have seen in the Philippines the first app presented to the population that is leveraging DLT and that is specifically because the government really wants the unbanked also to finance the COVID recovery in the country. So now from capital markets where they're really trying to engage citizens by aggregating them and offering them a pathway to become climate financiers, let's look at exactly that and what's going on with mobile money platforms. There are a number of solutions coming online that offers you and me and normal investors to invest in tree assets. So assets that capture and store carbon, and a number of them even with a return of a few percent. It also offers through tokenization of the trees, to introduce liquidity so you don't have to hold onto your tree until it matures, maybe 10 years later. But where some of the really big potential is with our partner ANT Group in China. They have built in an application on the Alipay Wallet where if you download it, you invite algorithms to analyze 18 of your everyday behaviors. So whether you take the bike or the train or the bus, it gives you an automated carbon footprint in real time. And you then gain green energy points if you change your lifestyle from carbon heavy to carbon light. And when you have gained enough energy points, created enough positive externalities, you can then plant a virtual tree on your phone and after a certain period of time, you can actually plant a tree or Ant Group will plant a tree for you in real life. So we can essentially shift climate finance from something that happens in capital markets to something that has to do with you and your everyday choices and the community you're part of on that mobile money platform. And what you see on the slide is the AI thermal mapping of those trees. So you can actually as a user go in and click on the Inner Mongolia where your tree is planted. You can find and visit your tree morning, midday and evening to see where it is and what is going on. So this is digital, used to bring the proof of impact directly to you on your phone. These behaviors and this information is not tokenized, but it could as well be in the next round of digital iteration. I want to thank you for listening to these three examples and I wish you a very good conference.

Thank you very much, Marianne. I hope that you've watched us now and for you and for all of the viewers who we have now, I invite to leave your comments and questions. We'll be happy to discuss them in the last part of our webinar. And from Digital Finance, we are going to talk more about governance and I'm happy to invite Monique Bachner, co chair of the Governance Working Group at inadba. And I'm really happy to ask you about how do you build up dialogue with public authorities and regulators in the frame of digital finance and sustainable. Yes, thank you, Christina. Thank you to everybody who's watching as well. So as Mark introduced inadvertently a little bit before, I am one of the co chairs of the governance working group and also the standards working groups at inadba. And obviously a lot of what we're trying to do is to, again, a little bit like Marianne was just saying, you know, empower people to get involved and to drive change. And through the working groups at inapa, we are doing that by engaging with both governance academics and the industry to bring everybody to the, to the table to discuss these matters. So the question was specifically on governments and engaging with those. INAPA has a government advisory board where there are members from across the globe who are represented and we do different engagement and reaching out with them to discuss ideas for policymaking both on a hard law and soft law level, and also just to increase that dialogue to get them all at the table. So they're coordinating and learning from each other. Many of them are bouncing ideas of each other where one region or one country has been a little bit more advanced in their thinking of a particular item. And you know, we really believe that working together is how we're going to get further. A great example is a series of events that we held in June and July or from May through July, which was about interoperability standards and governance, where we had people from governments across the globe discussing their policies and their thoughts around blockchain roadmaps and also about how to have interoperable systems across their regions, if not across the world. I also know that you are a member of the crypto farm community, as I am actually, so I'm really interested in your opinion. What women could bring to developing sustainable solutions in the tech area. What are the benefits that can bring women's involvement? Well, I mean, I think women are half of the population of the world, so it's kind of silly to ignore half of the population if you want to have sustainable solutions that are for the benefit of the population of the world. INAPA in its name has, for example, sustainable blockchains. And the UN goals are also talking about sustainability. And I think that having women or diversity in all its forms really will lead to more inclusive outcomes on all of the different things that we're working on. We've seen this before with the Internet and in many other areas. We end up with systems that are biased, that are skewed, where the power structures unfair or unequal. I mean, Simon just talked about Facebook and Libra and you know, the high level of market concentration coupled with the ignoring of the social impact. And if you ignore, you know, a big part of the globe, whether that's agenda or you know, regions of the globe or different, you know, other aspects that could be taken into account. You know, then, then clearly how can you have a sound and sustainable impact that is inclusive of all of mankind? And we're talking a lot in the crypto space about the blockchain space, about we're creating ecosystems for the future, we're building better. But if we want to build better, we have to do that together and we have to include everybody. Yeah, I totally agree, Monique. Thank you very much. I also think that digitalization helps us actually to look at the world through different eyes, because we are all now locked down, but at the same time, we are united together with the same problem and also with the same technology. Thank you very much, Monique. And I would like to move to real use cases now and discussing different climate issues, particularly climate neutral cities. And I would like to invite Alexei Chadwin from Evercity to tell us a little bit more in detail about climate financing activities and how does Evercity work to enable that.

Thanks, Cristina. And yeah, on that point, I would really like to stress out that we are talking about cities because governments have failed, literally failed, to help humanity solve SDG threats. And we can see that, you know, for example, Paris Agreement is not yet effective as it should be. And there are even more problems arising from climate change and its consequences, like new diseases. And there is a very logical, scientifically proved linkage between new deadly diseases and the spread of diseases and climate change consequences, as well as melting permafrost and all other harmful consequences of climate change that we're seeing now around us. But why are governments failing? Maybe because they just cannot represent all the interests of all the people and nationalities and all the parts of the crowd that really live in a national government where a country could be very big and many, many people could live there with various interests and needs. Maybe it's hard to manage the whole economic system, the whole territory, which is very typical for, for Russia, for example. And on the contrary, cities represent closed communities that live on the same land and share the same interests, same needs, and they understand better what actually they have and how they could use it to fulfill their needs. So we can see right now there is a global movement rising of the various cities that are uniting and somehow are making an answer to those global challenges. So that's why in every city, we really believe in the power of united cities, which are distributed agents by their nature, distributed entities. But at the same time, with the help of digital technologies, they can make interconnections and they can actually realize Sustainable development goals and the sustainable development concept more efficiently with managing all the resources which they have and exchanging them between cities. And this is exactly what blockchain and other distributed technologies are all about. So this concept really matches all the nature of new industry 4.0 technologies such as blockchain and all the others. So we really think that this could be a key to solving the global challenges and also serving the citizens and their best needs. This is why we work with cities. And one of the main aims of the cities right now is attract climate financing to adapt to climate change and its consequences, to establish climate mitigation programs and just prepare for the threats that are underway. We saw great examples during pandemics, the first wave, and I hope there will be no second wave, how digital technologies really helped to increase resilience to these global threats and how they enabled distribution of knowledge resources in a decentralized manner and benefiting all the people around the globe. Because for example, we were contacted by people around the globe who ran the various knowledge banks, various banks of solutions for the COVID threat, medical advice and all other stuff like how do you make something very efficiently in a short period of time to combat the disease and sharing this in a decentralized way all around the globe so everybody could benefit. And we saw many, many other examples that really proved that digital technologies are answering those threats and we should embrace them. And countries like European Union and some others, they now have put the digital component into the recovery packages as well as sustainability agenda. So we now see the emergence of these two worlds and this is actually a huge trend which will be very active during the next decade. And we see other signs that this is the future and this is our current trend which is rapidly rising. Because you probably heard of Amazon's Jeff bezos launching the US$10 billion climate fund and they've already invested in some deep tech solutions and Microsoft launching the climate operation system with Linux foundation and Google stating their carbon neutrality and investing in many deep tech startups in terms of climate action. So this is the trend, it's here and we're very happy to witness that. And this is something that really excites us about smart sustainable cities and implementation of digital technologies to make these cities really smart and really sustainable.

Very interesting. Alexey, I just have a very small question. So you work with a lot of cities. Cities, I imagine. Do you see any regional differences in approach in like governmental approach to digitalization in different continents? You mentioned European Union, you mentioned Jeff Bezos and Microsoft. So American businesses, what about Asia? What about other continents? Is there any difference in their approach to digital technologies and climate financing in particular?

Yeah, thanks for that question. We are also part of United for Smart Sustainable Cities initiative by International Telecommunications Union. This is a platform for smart and sustainable cities to communicate, exchange knowledge and learn from each other. So of course there are differences because the differences come from the sustainable development surrounding and strategy of the city itself. Because some cities are on the shoreline, they're exposed to various threats related to that. Some cities are somewhere in mountain area and they have their specific threats and so on. And various cities have various specialties, various resources, I mean human natural resources. So all that should be considered and managed and digital technologies are, are indeed very helpful here. And this group that I mentioned, they are developing common standards and KPIs for smart sustainable cities. So this is something that really helps to move this concept forward. But at the same time, cities are very different and sometimes they could act in a very interesting way because for example, I know one Russian region which wants to be carbon negative by 2030, but this has not yet been announced. And this being said, I mean that cities around the globe have more in common, sometimes even more than with their national governments. And this is what is actually interesting here.

Very interesting. Thank you very much, Alexei. So, from the city level, I would like us to move to the individual citizens level. And I invite Miroslav here to tell us a little bit more about the role of individual citizens in the developing climate agenda. Because we all sometimes have this tendency to think that these are businesses and governments that would help climate change to stop. What is that every individual citizen can do on his own level.

Thank you very much, Christina. So the work and the focus of my organization, iglotcha, is to really empower the individual citizen and especially youth, to take meaningful climate action. And I will show what role blockchain technology and digital finance is playing here. So the challenge is huge. The climate crisis is here. We have temperature anomalies, the CO2 concentrations are going up. We have the Paris Agreement aiming that we should become climate neutral by 2050. But we are lagging behind and we see then also on the individual level who is really leading a climate neutral lifestyle. We have here a homepage, the Climate Pledge for global citizens of the UNFCCC Secretari, which guides people on how to commit to a climate neutral lifestyle, to manage a carbon footprint and take action. But altogether there have been only 5,000 people who took this pledge. And it's a fact that the individual citizen has often a problem to really take the right decisions and really to steer action and resource use decisions towards climate neutral lifestyle. But this is a precondition for all the city level climate neutrality goals, national climate neutrality goals, European Green deal and everything. And therefore we are here to change this. And what is needed, it's the need for new thinking. We need a new narrative. We need to create communities, digital communities that nourish these individuals and especially youth to really be able to take impactful climate action. And we need really new engagement opportunities and collaboration tools. And the new narrative is that it starts with me, really the individual has the power and the responsibility to lead this transition to climate neutrality. We can create climate action communities with these digital tools and this is the social innovation component. And with blockchain technology and other digital tools we can create very effective and targeted incentive mechanisms. So this digital finance element is supporting this new narrative. And the important message is also that we need a new good life standard. What means a good life in times of climate emergency and how can we really get the new standards and the certified climate neutral lifestyle there? And our answers there are an individual Climate Action Dashboard app and global Individual Climate Action and Resource Management registry. So data and digital innovation are really the enabling factors. Tom has already mentioned that with the Climate Change Coalition we are working on D2I2, the data and digital innovation infrastructure for multi stakeholder climate action coordination and incentivization. And there are very many elements to it. Tom is specialized in smart standards, Alexei in digital bonds and impact digital measurement, reporting and verification. Our organization is working on this individual climate Action dashboard and creating these communities. We will hear also from Yunus from ICLE later how it is important this leadership of local authorities and cities with blockchain technology and Internet of things and other tools, climate Action outcome certification is possible. And there are these digital finance tools. And our organization has some solutions developed in the field of crypto stamps. And I will show you a little bit later. And one element of this global digital tools and infrastructure that is needed for getting people better engaged is to have a global climate action reporting language and a global registry with unique object identification, unique outcome identification. And Joe Broncas will tell you a little bit more about this unique object identification. And our view is that the future of global climate action will be that there will be apps and we are hoping that our Glottar Good Life app will be the leading service in this area and this kind of app will be on everyone's mobile device and the individual climate neutrality will be framed as a digital badges collection game. We have quite sophisticated concepts on how this individual climate action dashboard platform ecosystem will look like with SM goals and with the embeddedness with digital communities and climate action and Climate Finance Log which is connected with a global registry, you can visit our homepage our YouTube channel iaiglotcha. There you will see some more detailed information from presentations in previous events where we've had more time. Here is also a graph about financial flows and governance with crypto stamps and this global climate action registry. Again it will not be possible to go into all the details but There is a YouTube link to check it out. We have also for those who believe in our solutions and in our leadership and the potential to deliver we have a pre sale of Clocher crypto stamps on the actionnetwork.org and we have minted our first non fungible tokens digital collectibles, first generation Glocha crypto stamps on Opensea platform and the next steps where we want to go from the concept phase into real pilot projects and into this implementation on the ground is an important side event to the Daring Cities Forum on 22 October. Yunus from ICLE will tell you more about there. And we are looking for cities and other partners who will develop with us this app for our climate neutral citizens experiment. Also with voluntary carbon added tax system and digital climate bonds With Evercity we are working on an institutional innovation, a European cooperative society where those who want these solutions and who also want to have an enabling ecosystem for this digital green finance instruments to be issued. We are creating a cooperative society and for mass mobilization and for uptake of these technological solutions. We have music initiatives, we have gamifications, Climate City cup and we are also working with the UNFCCC Secretariat and other partners on blockchain technology and data infrastructure for climate philanthropy innovation. And here are my details, my contact details and this is how my organization is working towards empowerment of youth and the individual for a better world, a climate safe world and climate neutrality.

Miroslav, I see that you bring up a very responsible and important work you're working with you. That brings me to my next question to you that regards the education. I'm as a journalist also understand that we are very much responsible about the information that we dissipate into the world and about climate change. There are so many fake news and biased researchers. That's the fact doesn't mean that everything that presents itself as a climate change handling is a project that can be scam or can be maybe unknowledgeable and something incapable to handle these problems. So my Question to you is how, how can we foster blockchain technology and climate change literacy among youth? And what does gloture do for this?

Okay, so these are quite important topics. And the topic of fake news I'm not really an expert in, but as regards the youth topic, how to get them engaged is really, on the one hand, those elements that I've mentioned with music and with gamification and it's really the possibility of blockchain to create digital assets and really to tokenize outcomes of an individual's action and get it rewarded. This is a very good mechanism for getting young people engaged. We are also working or discussing and networking with the climate kick. They have a young Innovators program program. They're going into schools working on solutions. And I think this climate action reporting language and this mapping of climate action potentials in the neighborhood or some kind of citizen science approaches, these are very relevant and high potential for youth. And I see especially in the incentivization area, great potentials for blockchain because tokenization and giving value to what a young person can do for the climate, that's the key formula that is game changing. And it's also trust. With blockchain solutions, you can really have data about your actions and your impacts that is trustworthy and that's also the basis for financial flows. And yeah, these are some of the points where I think how we can get the young people. It needs to go also in the schools, but it needs to be also fun. And this kind of app needs to be on everyone's mobile device. That is my vision.

Wonderful. Well, knowledge is power. And speaking about fake news, well, knowledge of journalists as well as knowledge of the readers of any publication is also power. And it's only with knowledge that we can fight fake news, fake information, fake research. Thank you very much, Miroslav. Thank you. And I'm happy to invite Joe Bronkers, who was already mentioned by Miroslav. Joe is from the foundation for International Blockchain and Real Estate Expertise and also part of the World Working Real Estate Working Group of inadba. So could you please tell us a little bit more about your involvement into digital finance for climate action and also what is this unique object identification that Miroslav mentioned?

Okay, yes, thank you very much for presenting here. Let's start with that. I'm from the Netherlands, based in Europe, but Fibry, we represent an organization that is worldwide. We have roughly 100 people that are based in 70 locations across the world. And we bring together people that are interested in blockchain and Real estate. Real estate is the largest industry, construction and real estate. There's no larger industry in the world, but it's also a very important industry. When it to comes it comes to climate. Half of all the raw materials that we have in the world, they are used in construction works and in buildings. But also if you look to the greenhouse gas emissions and the energy consumptions, I think 40% of all the consumption of energy is happening in constructing or using of buildings. And if you then take into account that digitalization in the real estate sector is maybe lagging a little bit behind when you compare that to many other sectors, I think there's a lot of work that can be done, but also there are many challenges. And we the people in February that have a real estate background, we found out that creating better digital infrastructure is one of the first and major things that need to be done to make information better interoperable. So that also these digital solutions can have bigger impact. For example to fight climate change. And that's why in Fabry we listed several topics that we want to work on. And one of the most prominent topics that we have on our agenda is the unique opact identifier. And we have a video. It's taking three minutes to introduce introduce this topic, the problem statement and why we do this together on a global scale. And I don't know who can start the video. Is there anybody that has the video ready so that we can show it to the audience? Yeah, saw something.

Important role in our society.

But what do we actually know about.

The buildings we live and work in?

Well, there is extensive information available on real estate.

It is usually inaccessible, static, out of.

Date, that is unreliable and often difficult.

To locate because it's stored in different.

Databases and paper files of different parties.

And at different levels of detail and quality. Moreover, each user approaches the information from.

His or her own perspective.

As a result, we know little about.

A building and its surroundings.

Not only does this present a problem in tracking well being, pollution or fire.

And constructive safety for example, but also.

In terms of tracking the impact of existing, transforming and new buildings on climate action.

The lack of useful and reliable information.

Is a global problem for the real estate sector. A universal digital infrastructure for the built.

Environment is all the more important.

Today for achieving climate objectives. Public and private organizations from various countries are working together to develop a unique object identifier for these purposes. The UOI system serves as the key.

For accessing interoperable databases with dynamic information.

On new and existing buildings or their built environment.

The UOI enables you to view specific information relating to a building, floor, room.

Or window frame based on your role and access rights. Selected information from different databases can be connected and integrated into a comprehensive overview for the user in question.

This allows users to program process the.

Information directly at the sources and link it to the required building information. Changes to buildings are recorded directly in the source databases during the life cycle of a building, ensuring up to date.

Information for each user.

The development of UOI allows the parties involved to jointly develop future proof business.

Models and add more value to society and the economy.

If you would like to learn more about this, or if you would like.

To join the international consortium working on the Unique Object identifier, please contact us.

Okay, and then I want to. Take you to my screen where I'm going to show you where we are at the moment. At the moment you can see my screen. The video explains the topic. What we want to do is make information explain accessible. Well, we did this in the Netherlands, we started there, but we also brought this to the European level via the INABA working Group Real Estate and also with the INABA working Group Climate Action. And there we found out that Europe, with its green deal objective to become CO2 neutral. They defined the real estate sector also as one of the most important sectors. And they have several policy objectives where we think this unique objective we identify can become a key infrastructure component. So what did we do? We developed a 0.8 version in the Netherlands and now we are starting to create a public private consortium with companies and organizations and governments from multiple countries in Europe and the Netherlands. They wanted to keep in the lead. They decided now to to start the next phase for this development project. The next phase consists in doing some pilots. And these pilots, they are all very close related to climate to improve the climate footprint of the building sector. The first is that we have to have a UI generator that we can demonstrate to technical solution how it is designed. This will be ready in the end of this year and this will be the starting point for the four remaining pilots that we will do. We are going to do building renovation passports, we're going to do the quality checks of buildings. We're going to see if we can provide material certificates to individual building components. This will create new business opportunities for circular economy solutions. And in the end we will do the registration of renewable energy equipment like solar panels or wind turbines, how they can be connected to the houses where they deliver the power. Well, this is all going to happen in the next month. It is still an ongoing pilot and actually we invite everybody in the world that sees the real estate world that thinks has some solutions and likes to contribute, to share it with us and to join the consortium. So that's what I wanted to tell you about the unique object identifier and how the real estate sector can contribute to the climate goals. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much. That was very interesting and educating. And I'm happy to see that the real estate sector is as progressive as other sectors and not at all conservative. That's wonderful. Thank you so much. And I'm happy to invite here Yunus Arikan, who is director of Global Advocacy at Local Governments for Sustainability Network. Hi Yunus.

Hi Christina. Thank you. Thank you very much for the invitation.

Could you please tell us a little bit more about your experience in working with different cities and which cities are really pioneers and innovators in terms of blockchain and fintech implementation and how do you build up dialogue with them?

First of all, let me shortly introduce our organization, iclei, Local Government for Sustainability Global Network. It was established in 1990. So we are also celebrating like UN75, this is 30th anniversary of ICLEI. Our commitment is for sustainability in its entirety. We are also the legacy of the earth summit in 1992. Actually, it was ICLEI and its partners and leaders who was introducing the idea of Local Agenda 21 when the Earth Summit was concluded in Rio in 1992. Thirty years later, ICLEI reaches to the network of more than 1700 local and regional governments with a diversity of regional and continental and country. We have members from 120 countries around the world. It also changes from a small, urban, small rural community of 10,000 people to mega cities like Tokyo, Seoul or states like Sao Paulo. So in that regard, ICLE has been championing the idea that global solutions can be found at the local level. And I have listened to your colleagues, Alex, about their frustration. So indeed, until SDGs, local governments were championing their sustainability at the local level. At least the ones and members of ICLIB. And we are happy that in the SDGs, in 2015, also in Paris Agreement and the new urban Agenda, that national governments have renewed their commitment so that not the local governments alone. And that is exactly the reality of today. While certain examples are coming up from across the world, be it New York City, be it Seoul, be it Durban, around the world. And it's not necessarily limited to the megacities, but even cities like Darabin, Dunedin, these are the small communities with hundreds of thousands of people in Australia, New Zealand, but also communities like Mozambique, Kalimane who are championing the mobility. So they are aware that the solutions we face 30 years later is much more complex and that there are also the solutions that we could also search for together. Therefore, it's not the job of any more than the ministers of environment. It's not only the task of a minister or secretary of environment of the city, it's mayors, councillors and the local governments collectively that they are having their responsibility as of iClay's network today we are aware we have more than 700 local energy who are committed for being climate ambition champion of this climate ambition, with their commitment to 100% renewable, with their commitment to divest fossil fuels, with their adoption of declarations for climate emergency and their commitments for climate neutrality targets. But the essence is local governments, be it their administrations or their municipal fleets, they can commit, but they cannot lead the whole society. And that's why initiatives like Nero and all these partners to bring the citizens into the process, so that the administrations, the council decisions are implemented by or adopted by the cities as well the citizens as well as the challenge that we have to now make use of and the modern technology. All the colleagues have now mentioned the solutions and even the COVID have shown us that what we have think, we have thought before, what was not possible has become impossible because of the technology and all these solution providers. Therefore, we are interested to connect this innovative technologies. Let me give you a couple of examples. In fact, you were asking the technology being different in the rest of the world in Asia Korea is being the most interconnected in the world is being championing also the citizen engagement. Since 2010, Seoul Metropolitan Government has an echo mileage as a credit card. And I remember Miroslav was frustrated that UNFCC has engaged with 5,000 people. Seoul Metropolitan Government have engaged more than one and a half million citizens, which is 10% of Seoul population with this eco mileage with saving tons of energy equivalent to tons of carbon dioxide. And in fact this has become a national policy in Korea. Another example now we are implementing is with the European Cities on artificial intelligence for procurement, which is an innovative initiative which Amsterdam, Helsinki or Turku connecting to circular economy. So in fact there are numerous examples and with this dialogues over the past couple of years, we want to connect to our initiatives like Daring Cities Conference which I can give you example in a couple of minutes if you want.

Wonderful, Very interesting, Yunus, thank you. Definitely success of climate action lies and convergence of efforts from businesses, governments, individual citizens, academia altogether. I was told that you are organizing the Daring Cities forum. Could you Please tell us a little bit more about this initiative and also whether the climate action will be in the agenda of the forum as well.

Thanks for this opportunity. In fact, the name Bering Cities is the short abbreviation or short form, but the full name is the Daring Cities Global Virtual Forum of urban leaders taking on climate emergency. So in fact you can imagine that climate will be in the heart of the Daring Cities because we have been, as we have said, the 30 years of our experience, especially our World Secretary that we are based in, I'm personally based in Bonn. Over the past decade, especially after Copenhagen, we have convened the annual Congress on Resilient Cities, knowing that because of the Copenhagen tailor adaptation will be an issue. But we're now in the age of PARS agreement. We have managed that Partis agreement acknowledges engagement of local governments and over these years, especially last year, you have seen fighters for future pushing for climate emergency. Hundreds and thousands of cities councils have adopted climate emergency. So at this age, when we are talking about a decade, which is probably the last decade that humanity could see if it is not changing, but it is also at the same time the first decade for a transformation of action. So that's why we are convening this forum of climate emergency, the urban leaders taking on climate emergency. It will be a three weeks engagement. It will be based on the definition of the Daring cities in the sense that they should know, they should act and they should lead. And in that sense we will have mayors, hundreds of mayors and thousands of their participants will be interacting with ministers, but also UN officials. We would like to make sure that those solutions are spread, those solutions are shared and interconnected to the national and global embassies and also global agenda, be it the campaigns like race to zero or to the NDCs. So in that sense we have plenary sessions every Wednesdays and we will have side events, technical sessions and we have opened the doors for side events. And in that sense I'm proud and very happy. Glockja, the climate change coalition that Miroslav have been leading with his partners will convene a special side event session, especially topping topic of blockchain, how it helps climate neutrality, how climate emergency and connecting to cities. This will be on the 22nd of October around 6pm and it will be online and registration will be shared through our website, daringcities.org and from glotcha and you can also find all the other access information. But this the point I would like to make is that also this 20th century, I mean we had our emission inventories of the cities we have around thousands of cities who have their emissions inventory available. But this is 20th century, let's say logic. I mean, I was listening to the FIBER initiative, our traditional scope one, scope two, scope three emissions accounting is according to the books, according to the consumptions, according to the data. In this era of this blockchain technology, what opportunities local government, especially the climate managers, the sustainability managers, could introduce and could integrate to their planning or open to their cities as well, is the discussion we'd like to have in this process. Be it from the roofs of the cities, which are their capacity to solar generation or emissions reductions, through fleets or their, their even citizen engagements, through their mobility activities, these are all the collective assets that we have to embed into the city planning so that the commitments that cities have done is becoming a reality. Because if it is not implemented by citizens, a city committing to climate doesn't make any sense. And obviously the UN FCCs, the UN SDGs, all need the citizen engagement through local governments because UN has the power to set the standards or global vision. But without implementation, without access of the administrations or collaboration of local governments with the citizens, the UN's and the global policy, the national goals cannot be met. And that is becoming a clear value for every institution that it is a collective effort and innovative technology is our biggest asset.

Wonderful, thank you very much Yunus. That's definitely something that I talked about, support and see you all so at the forum exactly in a month. Thank you very much. Great initiative. So you mentioned the importance of dialogue and convergence of efforts of different entities, business, governments, individual citizens and also science. So I would like to invite here Martin Weinstein, who is the founder and lead scientist of of the Yale Open Innovation Lab. And Martin, welcome, welcome on board. And I would like to ask you how do you see the potential of the blockchain technology for climate action enhancement?

Hi Christina and hi everyone that's online. Thank you very much for organizing this amazing coordination and exciting times as the New York Climate Week and unfolds. But also critical times as we see multidimensional changes happening around. But a great opportunity for us to collaborate now more than ever to first start addressing your question. The Open Innovation Lab at Yale University was started around two and a half years ago out of the result of a series of research that I that I did on the important role that digital innovation and new digital technologies have in the capacity to establish enabling business ecosystems, peer to peer trusted platforms that empower businesses and allows them to collaborate at some level because of the need for driving multi stakeholder Collaboration, because the problems that we see at the macro level are planetary. We have to create really globalized digital solutions. And this is particularly hard a lot about standards and protocols already today, but coming up common languages is a key issue. And so from the academic standpoint, it's very important for us to use science to understand the key leverage points at that planetary level. So leveraging what we understand best from Earth System science and then connected to the entrepreneurial world. And that's one of the key things that enabled the Open Innovation Lab is fusing academia and entrepreneurship to launch projects that help bring together the stakeholders. With that being said, I'd like to stress the importance of the digital innovation community in the context of the UNFCCC process that we launched a bit under a year ago in Madrid thanks to the leadership of Miroslav, thanks to the work that we've been doing at the Climate Change Coalition and the collaboration with unfccc, it is extremely relevant for us to come together and support the Secretariat that is pushing forward the Paris Agreement, which is the most important tool we have to achieving climate neutrality. There's a lot of important, important areas for improvement around integrating non state actors and sub national governments, but we do have a very fixed global stocktake initiative happening every five years. And it's the data integration and the digital integration that has to simplify the process for the Secretariat that they've been in some sense the heroes of the last decade doing the climate accounting from an analog perspective. And now we have to robustly enter the digital world in how we manage that Paris Agreement. So I just want to stress that initiative that was probably introduced earlier today, but there's also an important role for the private and the subnational government to perform their own climate pledges and track their actions to those pledges there. I want to highlight the relevance of the opportunity put forward by the independent global stocktake, which in some sense is a way for the entire community, all stakeholders, to work together in supporting also the Paris Agreement, but through an independent process. This is a huge playground for innovation for the entire digital community. So important that one of the key verticals that we've focused from the Open Innovation Lab has been integrated climate accounting as well as digital finance. And climate accounting is so vast and requires so much collaboration that we launched late last year the Open Climate Collabathon and this year, starting November 9th to November 23rd, the collaborative hackathon, which is the space that we open up, will run from those dates, essentially covering the gap from COP 26. Oh, I think I muted Myself, how do we come together in the context of the different working groups and the different initiatives that have already popped up in the last couple of years to support an independent global stocktake so that we can take on planetary accounting from the bottom up and also directly support the UNFCCC process. So November 9th to November 23rd the Open Climate Collabathon will be opening the space and in collaboration with all the different initiatives that are also happening in the context of the now postponed COP26. And then having said those two things, the importance of the digital innovation community and highlighting the independent global stocktake and the opportunity of using the collabathon for bringing those different working groups together. We've heard from Anapa Climate Change Coalition, I chair the Hyperledger Climate Action Group. There's iwa, the Inner Work alliance launched this year. There's a wealth of very well empowered organizations driving us forward and it's important that we come together to hack at common projects. So this definitely takes the role of a hackathon. But finally, what I'd like to stress is the importance of digitally integrating our financial infrastructure, our climate action infrastructure and an accounting space. So one of the updates that we have is the Open Lab had such an important traction in the last couple years, particularly in bringing forward a vision for this integrated climate accounting system that we're launching this year, the Open Earth Foundation. We'll launch that officially November and one of the key focus points there is to bring more dedicated digital innovation teams putting forward open source digital infrastructure to this space. There's a wealth of knowledge, there's a lot of thought where but we also need the nonprofit sector in partnership with the academic sector to also bring forward open source solutions that the entire community can use. So that's definitely one of the key things of the foundation. And one of the key interesting projects on digital finance is particularly empowering community climate action, which often is extremely hard to aggregate around financial instruments. We launched for example, a project in 2018 after Hurricane Irma and Maria took down the grid in Puerto Rico. And we needed to figure out how do we finance not large scale solar program projects, since economies of scale and project finance has a lot of tools for doing that. How do we aggregate the financing of over 10,000 solar projects? How do we bring in smart contracts to digitally templatize the project finance deals? And that has had a lot of traction. We now in the late phase to get the Security Exchange Commission approved for a project we called Open Finance and its first instance called Open Solar. So we're also going to be opening up that project in November for people to build on top of it and identify opportunities on how that can be replicated in our jurisdictions as we also start a new project on creating an end to end digital climate Bonds initiative to really consolidate our knowledge on macro financial instruments and how these can represent the integration of that bottom up climate action community level projects. Love to answer any question from your end as well.

Thank you very much Martin. That's incredible to know that academia and science sector is working so much on digital finance for climate action. We're looking forward for this colorbathon now. It's my favorite word. Wonderful. That is what we need during pandemics for sure. Thank you very much. And I would like to bring us to another very interesting initiative that was launched last year I.e. climate Investment Platform and we have here a member of the team and climate finance expert Andrew Ailments. Andrew, could you please tell us a little bit more about the Climate Investment Platform and which progress has it achieved since the last year when it was announced in the frame of NEO Climate Week?

Sure. Thanks so much Christina and a real pleasure to be part of this important event today and serving the Climate Week agenda of scaling up climate action. So with your permission I would like to share my screen here. I have a few slides that I hope will make it a little easier for the audience to follow along. Can you see the screen? All right. It should be visible now, I believe so. My name is Andrew Isle and I am the focal point at UNDP for the Climate Investment Platform and I will be speaking briefly about the Climate Investment Platform, what it's accomplished since its launch at this time last year at the Climate Action Summit in New York and also give a brief overview of what's been accomplished to date and how we can interface with the blockchain and digital finance space. So the Climate Investment Plan Platform, or SIP for short, is about helping countries to reach their ambitious climate goals and in particular we are looking to engage with the climate finance community to help streamline and declutter the space in such a way as to enable better coordination of the suppliers of climate finance and smoother, more rapid access to by seekers of climate finance to those sources in ways that help scale the deployment of resources to address the clean energy transition and clean energy access as well as ambitious, nationally determined contributions to meet the Paris Agreement. The SIP is a partnership first and foremost that brings together different organizations in a complementary the announcing partners are undp, the International Renewable Energy Agency or irena Sustainable Energy for All and we work in close collaboration with the Green Climate Fund, our fourth announcing partner, to facilitate clean energy investments. We work with governments at all levels, financial institutions, project developers and the private sector. Most importantly, we work through strategic partnerships and and also by responding to inbound requests and collaborations at the country level, where we can leverage our various resource sets to help projects reach bankability and be ready for engagement by the donor and the private financial community. And we're currently exploring ways that we can engage with the blockchain and digital finance community to help advance these goals for clean energy deployment and climate action. Now we have four different tracks. I'll touch on these very briefly and we can return to these in the Q and A, seeing as time is tight. We work on climate targets, helping to meet NDCs. We work on policies and regulations, essentially de risking the policy space and creating the enabling environment for private investment. There's financial de risking and then there's a marketplace of matching the supply of climate finance with demand and transaction support. And I've illustrated here some possible avenues where we could work with the blockchain and digital finance communities, and we can perhaps come back to that a bit later. I should emphasize that first and foremost the SIPP is about delivering benefits on the SDG agenda and on the climate agenda. We are focusing our efforts on enabling countries to respond to the COVID 19 crisis to implement their ambitious, nationally determined contributions on the climate side, Expand opportunities for climate finance, address energy access and transition goals goals and again as mentioned before, build value add partnerships that bring together various players in the space. I'll note very briefly here that we are already working on the ground in a number of countries. Sudan, Colombia, Sao Tome and Principe. Vanuatu and Comoros are among the countries where we're working. You'll see that we have three small island development states or sids are represented here, which is a core or focus of our efforts. And particularly countries that have historically had difficulty tapping into private capital markets and even accessing donor resources because of capacity constraints and the small sizes of their markets. What's next for us? We are working on the ground in specific countries. As mentioned, we're responding to inbound requests for support that can be submitted on the SIP website. We're building our network of partners, both development delivery partners and financiers who can help respond to these requests and needs. And we're looking to explore ways how we can work with blockchain and digital finance, including on how those tools can be unlocked. Specifically in the countries where we're working, both at a pilot level and potentially at the country level, and also developing global partnerships to advance platforms, registries and tools that help us to address our mission of providing broader access and utility of climate finance. With that, I'll note that we have a website and a Twitter handle that I hope you can follow us for more information and I would be happy to field any questions that you have. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Andrew. That was really interesting. I wonder, which application for blockchain do you see in the frame of the climate investment platform?

So I think that's a great question. I think there are a number of potential ways we could go about integrating. I think there are technologies that can be deployed for promotion of new finance solutions as we've heard. There's virtual crowdsourcing, there are cryptocurrency based solutions with initial coin offerings and other methods of tokenization to help raise capital. There's certainly a lot of solutions out there for distributed energy solutions and also a pay as you go household solutions, mini grids and micro grids. And so we're looking at the interface between distributed energy and the digital finance toolkit. And I think we're also really interested in using the blockchain toolkit for tracking of impact towards the sustainable development goals and climate goals. As Martin was just speaking to. I think that's a really important, important space that can activate new stakeholders in this community. And so I think we're still at the early stages of this journey. We ourselves as a platform and a partnership are only one year old. We're still in the process of operationalizing and I think we're very open minded as to ways that we can partner with actors in the space with the Climate Change Coalition and others who've been part of this event so that we can help make some of this potential a reality.

Thank you very much, Andrew. That is very interesting and insightful. Thank you so much. We need to go to the next speaker now because we have so many wonderful speakers yet to go. So I'm happy to invite here Xiaoxian Zhang, President of FinTech for Good and Executive Council of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific Sustainable Business Network. Shaoxin, going back to the UN Task Force report where you took part. What are the calls for action for the digital and global fintech community? You are muted. Thank you.

Sorry.

Thank you very much for the invitation and my name is Xiao Chunjiang and I have been following the conversation the whole morning. Morning is very exciting and inspiring and you know, to come back to your question and definitely, you know, the UN Secretary General digital financing for SDG Task force final report is extremely exciting for us because it's one of the first time that we see that, you know, there is a systematic research and on the topic and where that the final.

Finding.

Was inspiring in a way to show us that with the new digital technology that we are seeing the emergence of a citizen centric financial system. And with this new system where that Simon mentioned earlier, many of the tradings of trading dollars can be unlocked to SDG related activities and projects. So as when we talk about climate change or sdg, one of the main constraint is always around climate finance and with digital technology to unlock that potential and we don't probably need additional finance and then that mobilizing individual contribution to the SDG can potentially address part of the financial gap. That is some, you know, one of the area which was not being sufficiently, you know, explored in the past. And if you may allow that, you know, I, I will share with you of you know, some of our work along the the same line and I want to share my screen. Oh, thank you. So interestingly, you know, now as Miro and others also mentioned that so many, you know, more than 30 some economies have already make the carbon neutrality go. Some, you know, it's, you know, by it it's very clear that you know, national government have, are making commitments to just achieve the climate change goal. And of course they need to translate that commitment into industry, go into subnational practice and all that. And then you know, many of the industries or cities are facing also great challenge how they can just, you know, translate their current economic growth agenda together with the climate commitment to generate new type of models which can achieve the development in a different way. And that's you know, basically the task that we take some time to just think of and we want to look at, you know, from the traditional economic development models that you know, the sub national entities and also national government are familiar with and what, what we can learn from that and how we can just translate the digital innovation related opportunities into some vehicle which are already familiar to the, you know, government agencies. So that's the reason why we look at you know, industry park as a vehicle and see that how can we just, you know, translate digital innovation into industry park type of vehicle and help, you know, government and sub cities to look into the issue from a way that they are very familiar with. Because if probably most of the audience for this event are familiar with the economic growth that happened in developing country in the past 30 or 40 years where that industry park was being used as a pilot testing and new model creation vehicle. And where after the innovation is being tested then they then the country or the city can scale up. And you know when we just look at all the digital innovation which are available and how can just. How can we just use the index park to you know, help that translation to help that pilot. Then you know we come up with a full phase process then to identify our approach methodology and also identifying the potential innovators who are in the space who can potentially provide that kind of support then to just following a sequence. We can just start from the conception to to pilot than to scale. And here within the grand digital economy Innovation Park PPP PPP stands for public Private partnership. And from this concept you can see that we have six components. The first component is a new macroeconomic model where that's CBDC Central Bank Digital currency currency provide a new tool for the central bank to just come up with a new macroeconomic model to just really collect analyzing real time regular and holistic data which provide the guidance or decision making to combine both physical, economic and financial aspect of the economy that can be at national level or at the subnational level, even at the industry park level. And the second component is around a new digital protocol and where that we have blockchain, IoT, drones and AI. So many new digital technology VR, AR and if each technology just operate with each own protocol then when we introduce a new model then we also introduce a new silo where that's one technology cannot talk to the other technology. Then we need to just help the country or cities to understand there are existing protocol help you to just really create this immersive experience to just combined physical and digital in one. And so that's the new protocol. And the third component is around new blockchain network. And where that's you know not only that you know we are looking at the protocol level. We're also looking at you know what are the existing for example blockchain network. That's other at the national level where that's or regional level where that different countries or cities within that region within that can just develop apps and launch their new instruments. Here again that we have some partner working on that. The fourth component is the new capital market instrument and faster payment system. And we all know that Tree Finance There's P2, P2C C2C type of payments related challenge which just or hindered progress especially from you know, remittance from trade finance et cetera. And where that we are you Know looking at within the innovation park having those tested solution provider to provide that payment infrastructure and also other bond and other potential capital market instruments and make the mainstream capital market player understand how to really just leverage digital technology. And the fifth component is the new SDG related result tracing tracking system where that we already have several speakers such as Alexey and others already mentioned that there are quite a number of efforts and platform already there and trying to reduce the cost improve accountability in SDG reporting which also include the climate related reporting and result tracking system. So the last component is around new industries by the end of day. That's you know, we many of the developing countries cannot just, you know, go to the radical degrowth type of model. They still need to just look at growth or development but then they need to just. You know, looking at the growth or development in a different way. Which means that they need to look at existing industry and how to reduce carbon emission, you know, for this industry and how. And also how to just create new industries. And we should just provide that kind of service to citizens. But from beginning it just generates much less the carbon emission. And here that we are looking at different sectors such as energy, sustainable housing, education, food and health care. And within this business model and here is our approach and where that it really have four stages. Stage one is the scoping and for each component we are looking at tested digital innovation which we can potentially introduce to different cities or countries. The second phase is that we convene different leaders from different stream that we work with and partners to have a dialogue and bring additional players into the space and sharing the concept and also sharing potential opportunities make sure that such opportunity being properly understood. And the third phase is through pilots and where that's now we are moving from the convenience phase to the pilot where that we have three pilots. One in Asia, two in Africa and where that we can can just pilot the green digital economy innovation park idea. And then the last is, you know, after the pilot is achieved from Asia and also Africa. Then we can just potentially scale up in more countries. As you can see from the graph before below that in the past few months that you know, we did a lot of research for the scoping identifying in each category quite a number of digital platform and the solution provider and who have agreed to be part of this and can potentially support the government at both national and the subnational level to implement the innovation park ppp. And secondly that we organized the CBDC Central Bank Digital Currency Forum, World Responsible Leaders Dialogue and also Sustainable Housing Roundtable etcetera and then really just look at each of the category and see what kind of collaboration are the most comfortable for both the members of this ppp, but also for the national and sub national governments as well. And our next conversation will be on October 16th and that will be around the the CBDC again. And you know, if you have any question or if you want to contribute to this PPP and all be, you know, a part of implementation or part of the solution provision or part of, you know, the introducing this to your own government and you're welcome to contact us at email below and we'll be very happy to continue the conversation and answer any questions. Thank you very much.

Wonderful. Thank you so much. We can see that the fintech is implemented for good in both senses. So for good and forever because networking and continuity of knowledge is definitely basis for for an implementation of a technology for good. Thank you very much and I would like to give the floor now to Raymond Var Ehrman that is Advisor to President at European Partners for the Environment.

Hello.

Since the 1992 conference, empowerment has been a major objective. However, during the past three decades commitments were made often not follow through as.

We were missing the technological tool to succeed in monitoring progress From a global standpoint.

The UN report of the Task Force.

On Digital Financing and SDGS which was.

Presented today is a milestone. Digitalization must democratize the governance of finance to democratize finance itself, stated the UN Secretary General. From a European standpoint, while the EU.

Has adopted a EU Recovery Plan strategy and the principles of a European Green.

Deal, a consortium which includes the organizers of this webinar are working hard to implement the citizen centric finance vision of the UN Task Force report by shaping a blockchain winning organizing system in the field of public funds managed in support to the Green Deal and climate action. We want to contribute to system leadership for transformational change by addressing together three the Green Revolution and planetary boundaries, the Citizen Centric and Sustainable Finance Revolution and finally the Digital Revolution. With the connection with empowerment, the consortium will clarify the opportunities and options for connecting data related to public funds to incentivize trust in relation with Europe's public funds. This project is expected to have a global impact as many climate initiatives around the globe are receiving public funds from Europe. It will also explore more in detail.

The feasibility for specific value chains as.

Food systems and building retrofits as well as partnership Africa Europe in relation with European public funds as green bonds, grants, equity, blended capital and so on. That's all as far as we are concerned. Over to you.

Thank you very much I would like to ask you, how do you see blockchain application for climate action, particularly for European Green Deal?

What we want to secure is that the existing ecosystem of blockchains already dealing with climate change and of course the Climate Change Coalition is the key player in this regard. What we want to be sure is that this coalition of blockchains will be able in the year to come to trace the use of public fans in support to the implementation of the climate agenda. And by doing so, we want to improve the efficiency of public funding use in particular when it comes to public.

Private financial partnership as it is very much developed nowadays.

Over to you, do you see already some pilot initiatives using blood blockchain in order to track funds, public funds for Covid recovery European Green Deal?

Well, it appears that indeed.

30 European.

Governments have launched what is called the.

European Blockchain Partnership.

But when it comes to use blockchain to trace the use of UN funds, so far more or less nothing has been done except the decision to start to work on the notarization of documents which will have to be audited by the Open Court of Auditor. So there is room for major improvement when it comes to the tracing of public funds, which is important from an.

Efficiency point of view, from a trust.

Point of view, as well as in terms of fighting corruption, which is, as.

You know, one of the objectives of the OECD Global Blockchain Center.

Over to you.

Thank you very much, Raymond, that was very insightful. Thank you so much. I wish we could talk for more, but we need to go to the next speaker and I'm happy to invite Pierre Taleb, climate finance mitigation expert at the African Development Bank. Pierre, the report by African Development bank in 2020 says that blockchain technology is one of six transforming technologies for Africa. Where do you see its potential the most and how do you see the development of blockchain application in Africa?

Thanks a lot Christina for first of all letting me giving me the opportunity actually to be here. And indeed what we are really seeing before, really coming to your question, is that there is a certainty at this stage of time that before the end of the century we are going to enter into a climate economic crisis. And the question is not very much about when that will happen, it's actually whether that will happen. It's just about when it's going to take place. And now we are seeing with the economic slowdown with COVID 19, we have witnessed and we are still witnessing that we have entered into this recession without even realizing it. And we fear that it's going to be the same thing with the climate crisis or the climate recession is that when we are going to get into it, we are just going to realize that we are already in the middle of the recession and closing borders and lockdowns like it's happening today. We don't think that is going actually to help very much when we arrive at that stage. So as things are standing today, or when we look at the likely course of things, we see that in Africa, even in Odah countries, not just developing countries, events such as flooding, forests, getting inflamed like in the us Land degradation, water scarcity in many cities, or temperatures that are rising every year, we experience peaks that are higher than the previous years. This is going to increase in terms of frequency and in terms of magnitude. And that really requires that we rethink the global economy today. And we see that there is actually a potential of blockchain technologies, or just roughly said digital solutions to play a role into this. In fact, if there is one announcement that I would like to make at this New York Climate Week is that everything is about transactions. When you think of it, the whole human activity which is now very much affecting our climate, is revolving around transactions. People are achieving transactions, whether that is on mobility, on manufacturing cycles, employment, education, services, friendships everywhere. There is always a transaction that needs to happen. And according to, you know, some statistics also we have seen that the global emissions, greenhouse gas emissions this year have fallen by 5% compared to last year levels. And this outcome has been mainly attributed to slow demands on energy and transportation. So in reality what has happened is that there have been much more efficiency in transactions or there have been a slowdown in transactions that have resulted in less negative climate impact. And people have been working from home, digital solutions have been replacing physical enclosures. So this journey towards digitalization has been actually a good thing to the climate. If I can just give an example, this year I'm very much sure that we have used less paper this year for printing because when people were working from home, printing has been done at employees cost rather than employers cost. And you know that rethinking our global economy is also a little bit about even restoring our forest. So talking about forests, you know, also every five years we've been losing 1% of Global Forest. And this situation in Africa is also exacerbated because there are issues of energy access also that are leading to the depletion of forests at the same time. So while collectively and individually we are depleting every five years what takes 25 years to grow at the scale of the globe? You know, transaction, we are transaction for printing, for packaging, for burning. And then we have opportunities that can be supported by the blockchain, for instance, in smart packaging, you know, and reuse even of packaging on hand. You see this year, 99% of vehicles produced in the world, engine vehicles, you can barely get actually at a reasonable price. They are electric vehicle. And yet 15% of the global greenhouse gas emissions are coming from transportation. Africa specifically is a huge market which has lots of need for mobility, you know, because of the concentration also of the population in rural areas. And to be actually be able to solve the issues of remoteness at the same time. Before COVID 19, car sharing was a great idea, and sharing electrical cars was even a better idea. But now we have learned from home office that electric vehicles can actually be seen as a source of energy storage. So I think it's not going to take much time before we can even see villages being electrified in Africa, you know, using vehicles, electric vehicles as backup source of power. Because the payback on electric vehicles is today, not anymore a matter of mobility payback, but it's also about covering electricity expenses because of that opportunity. And here again we have seen some pilot blockchain projects that are actually enabling some transactions, again in a very smart way, which are helping combine solutions on renewable energy and electric mobility at the same time. So we think that the global economy rethinking it is going to take some effort at the global scale, not just in Africa. And it's not a secret that the climate impact which this year has been delivered by the people working at home has a very high value. And by no means that can be attributed specifically to climate funding. It's the result of the work of people which have chosen to do what is best under exceptional circumstances. So the blockchain so far I think has shown us how we can develop smart contracts. There is still way to go. I think we can see here areas of improvement, for instance, on smart logistics, smart orders, routine smart deliveries, or even smart organizations also powered by the blockchain with this overall digitalization. And it's not by no means saying that the whole world or Africa in the future will be a place where everyone is chained into their own block, but really that there is a lot of computing power. You know, in Africa, for instance, 75% of the population have basically phone today. So, so that is also an opportunity with the mobile phone penetration, where using digital solutions, we can actually address climate change, which is in our view the biggest challenge of our time. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Pierre. That's really fantastic. I'm personally a fan of African potential for the development of blockchain technology, and I wish you to the best in implementing it because it definitely has all that it needs to have to bring more quality life to all the developing countries. Thank you so much. And I'm happy to invite here Eliot Chan, Emergency that Weald and Coal.

Hi, Christina, how are you doing? Thanks for great job hosting. I know it's been quite the session here, so you've done a great job leading us through this.

But I was waiting for your presentation because I have this question for you, you who are so experienced in the US fintech market, how do you feel the relevance of the climate action fintech to the overall US fintech market?

Yeah, I think it's growing, right? We're not there yet. I don't think we're anywhere where the people involved in this want to be today, but we're getting there.

Right?

And a couple observations from my previous peers that were on. I absolutely love the passion that everyone brings. I mean, if people are talking about climate change, the people that are on that were speaking earlier, all you gotta do is just listen to that passion and that voice and what they bring on a daily basis. It's inspiring, it's awesome, and it's great to have something with that level of passion. In finance, you typically don't see it very often, and today we're seeing a lot of that. Second is the global nature. Right. Pierre was just on from Africa. We had Zhao Chan, he's based in the States. My buddy there, Alexi and Miro and Joe and Martin, they're all over the place. So this is truly a global initiative. And then finally, there's been a lot of talk on how close are we for blockchain to actually be implementable. And we're so early in this. And I think that's one of the key things. I think we all want to make change as quickly as possible, but the adoption of the technology from a broader perspective just hasn't happened yet. So we're still very, very early in the process. I mean, most of the, again, the peers that are speaking today have only been doing this, which is applying new technologies to solving climate change issues for maybe two years max. So we're still very early. A couple final points there is innovation is the solution. I think we all can see that we cannot apply past technology solutions to 2020 problems. It's just not gonna work. We need to Be thinking ahead what's gonna be there in 2025 and what's gonna be there in 2030. I think the current pandemic situation that we have has given us an opportunity to take innovative out of what we are all talking about today and turn it into an everyday application. And that is going to be key towards adoption and towards getting these innovative solutions to actually be everyday solutions. And which is kind of where your question was Christina, gets us to the financing markets and how we can improve the facilitation of the flow of capital into, from traditional sources or even new sources into these new climate changing initiatives. And I do think capital markets is a little bit behind, but that doesn't mean that we can't actually take action now. And there are tools in the market today that are providing access to accountability, accountable leaders, accountable solutions, accountable teams and then reward whether or not you want that reward financially, whether you want it more on an impact basis. So access accountability and reward. Again, we're still early but the foundation to facilitate that is being built now. And even with Andrew's CIP type solution, you're seeing some of those, some of those, those, those new ideas actually come into play. Finally, as we think about what are investment structures that can work. I really appreciate what Alexi is doing on, on the digital green bonds. That is, that could be something that is game changing. Zhao Chen talking about triple ppp. We're in a moment now where every single city is dying to figure out how they can fill the funding gaps that they're seeing. I just heard New York City, which is where I am right now, has a billion dollar deficit. Well, how is that going to happen? Is it going to be the federal government just printing? No, I believe that there are ways that we can create investment structures that align the interests of institutional investors and just regular retail or normal people investors to help fill the gap that will allow climate change initiatives that are implemented by cities yet in sustainably structured ways. And so yeah, that I know I kind of jumped into that Christina, so I apologize but that's kind of where what I wanted to touch on.

Could you please tell me what does reassure you that Wall Street, Wales keep seeing climate tech as an investment opportunity even in times of economic challenges as we all have now here in the.

Yeah, unfortunately it's broken in its current situation. It just is not going to work. And I try to be as optimistic about it but unfortunately the interests just aren't aligned. For those that think that they're, hey, I'm a traditional investor or whale As a term that you used it, their primary, generally speaking, their primary goal is financial return. And now on the other side for climate change, we have things like, hey, you can generate metrics, real measurable metrics around environmental impact that you are creating through your investment. I would jump at that in two seconds, but I'm not the one with the capital, unfortunately. So how, how do we create a better infrastructure? How do we create a better model that aligns those interests properly, that allows people to say, hey, I want to pull the financial reward side of things only. Okay, cool, we'll create a structure that allow you to do that. Or for others to say, I don't care about the financial financial reward, I care about the environmental or the social impact rewards. Here, give me all of that. So until we can, and until we can figure out some of those structures which are absolutely underway, we're not starting from zero, but we're very early into it. And I think we're starting to see with NFTs, with digital green bonds, with micro grids. I think in two to three years, Christina, we're going to be having a very different conversation during Climate Change Week NYC and hopefully it'll be in person.

Wonderful. I like the optimism. Thank you very much. And definitely one of our own goals for all of us to be educating and fostering education about climate change issues among every important actor in the economic markets all over the world. Thank you very much, Elliot.

Thank you.

And I'm happy to give the floor to Joseph Pallant, who is the founder of Blockchain for Climate Foundation. More about the foundation and also, what is your role in implementing Article 6 of the Paris Agreement?

Absolutely, Christina, thank you. And thank you to all the organizers and speakers. And just seeing so many familiar faces on this call, long deep call and that longitudinal commitment is just so inspiring. So thank you so much. So I work with Blockchain for Climate foundation and we're putting the Paris Agreement on the blockchain to connect the national carbon accounts of all the world and enable cross border climate collaboration on emission reductions. And you know our pitch, the elevator pitch of what do you do? You need to refine it. If you're really good you can micro target it. And of course the one I said there was broad in specific, as mentioned, we're working on building tools to put Article 6 and in particular Article 6.2 of the Paris Agreement on the blockchain. So primarily we're a group of volunteers from across a variety of sectors with a belief in the value of using blockchain to help beat climate change. This volunteer work has been really amped up a level by generous support from the RBC Tech for Nature program. And in a really happy memory of New York Climate Week last year, it was actually we learned of our grant a year ago today in a bagel shop in Brooklyn on the way to the unhq. So really need to be back for New York Climate Week. We deeply believe in the vision of the United nations and our team is an earnest supporter of the unfccc, the body within the UN that's working in specific to beat climate change. And we saw an opportunity to help develop infrastructure to help make their job easier and jumpstart international carbon trading once the negotiations had completed. So we're trying to slipstream in and be developing something for rules finalized in the future, but using our best take on what's needed and what will continue to develop and be agreed on in the process. And we're really excited because getting the use case and the platform design right is really a compelling process, to put it mildly, because you need to have the insights onto what's needed in the climate space, what's needed to build a tool that hopefully the UNFCCC can adopt, or more specifically its national parties can adopt. And then we also have to pair this intelligently with the tools created in the blockchain space, understanding what's coming along and also dreaming into the future what we're going to need to innovate on. And we're really excited right now because we get to shift from this design phase to the build phase. We've been able to hire our first dedicated developer and really get that coding rolling. And so briefly, sort of the fundamental tasks of what we're building it, we're calling it the BITMO platform. The blockchain internationally transferred mitigation outcome platform has a couple key fundamentals. So our goal is to be able to issue and exchange Paris compliant carbon credits. Article 6.2 ITMOs and this issuance and exchange is really the key part of our MVP that we're building right now. And it's kind of our ambition has been modest and sort of pre market fungibility and market making aspects of this. But we're excited as other parts of the blockchain, other parts of trading, including stuff like OpenSea, really starts to enable this to hop its silo out into broader use. The focus is on national party issuance of these carbon credits. So under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, Article 6.2 focuses on the ability of governments to sort of use their sovereignty to issue ITMO's carbon credits based on emission reductions that have happened in their country. And it's a, it's a fundamental, fascinating and kind of new piece. Whereas Article 6.4 is kind of like a re development, a revisioning of the Kyoto Clean Development Mechanism, transparency of this underlying asset is critical. It's critical for market making and I think it's really critical for the vision of Article 6.2 and broader out into the Paris Agreement. So I'm a long term carbon offset project developer. I really believe in the tool and I know that what makes that environmental asset, that intangible outcome of a bunch of hard work valuable is the ability for buyers, sellers, market watchers, environmental NGOs, governments to understand what's behind that carbon credit, what created that carbon credit, what kind of auditing and assessment has been done to ensure that this is the real deal. One of the fascinating things about Article 6.2 is that national parties, that governments really hold all the chips in terms of what will be counted as one of these credits. So we cannot change that reality, but we are building for that reality so that every token that we issue every BITMO is fully transparent on the key need to know aspects of a carbon credit. And that that's really on the skin of this credit. We're building it. Our long term vision has been building of a non fungible token and NFT for this. And a lot of the engineering that's happened posts cryptokitties has really allowed us to advance this work and so that's a lot about what we're building. We're really passionate about the Ethereum ecosystem. We are very fortunate to be following in the great footsteps of people like Alexei and his team at Evercity and beyond in this vision of putting carbon credits on the blockchain and really excited to be able to do this for what we think is really the crypto, the killer use case for blockchain vis a vis climate. And we are growing our team right now. We've got a job posting closing tomorrow for a digital community manager. Canada is really leaning in in Covid recovery and so they've been funding a lot of student and youth employment. So if you know somebody under 30 in Canada wants to come and be a digital community manager and help build the system, please reach out. We're@blockchainforclimate.org lockforclimate on Twitter and we really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you all today. Thanks.

Thank you very much. Joseph, thank you so much. And I'm happy to Invite the last speaker today. I think it's very symbolic that the next speaker represents the young generation in the hands of which the climate, the planet and our financial system will lie very soon. So I'm happy to invite here Vienna Loy, who is the winner of the UN Reboot the Earth hackathon. Vienna, could you please tell us a little bit more about this project that you presented? And I wonder what is your perspective perspective on the rethinking of the financial system and digital finance for climate action? Thank you, Christina. So with the UN Reboot the Earth Challenge, it was like a global hackathon that the UN pulled together. And I want to say that a lot of my work was also informed by research that I've done with the Stanford zero degree project. So there's a lot to that. But today though, like, I really want us to get thinking more deeply on all these solutions that we're talking about, because just today it dawned upon me that, okay, well, we actually have already passed 1.2 degree increment already. So how realistic are the tools that we're talking today, even for what I'm talking about as well? So I will share what I'm talking about after this. First, I want to evoke the spirit of a dear friend, Tony Lane Casterly, who is the former co founder of Cointelegraph, who passed away unfortunately earlier this year. She Tony would ask radical questions like how can we have a new global governance on the blockchain so that we can actually resolve all this crisis? So with that spirit of Tony, like, I really want to ask all of us here today, like one, like, you know, if research shows that our capital in the global capital system is what is heating up the earth, no matter our good intentions, we are actually heating up the earth by virtue of our participation in the current system, then how will you like innovate on your solution or your own hot wallet to change the design of what you're working on? I would also share that at the Stanford Zero degree project, we had a framework of a ledger based on time, temperature and capital being the three major variable that we keep track of. Because we do believe that climate change stops when the 7.6 billion of us figures out how we can coordinate 7.6 billion 0 degree hours every hour, meaning that is when we can sustain 1.5 degree increment and never increase that again. I will let all of us sit with that question because it is a coordination question. And this is what brings me to my third question, like, what is finance role in all this Now I also want to evoke the spirit of David Graeber, who also just passed away, to say that finance actually existed before money. It was in the forms of iou, meaning relationships. Now, how can we make finance become relationship based again? Not one based on competitions, but one based on let's make sure that everyone's basic needs are covered and then we can use our surplus imagination to solve the crisis that we're in today. So those are the three questions. Like the first is what is your role if you are participating in a system that. If I were to read you the report that Oxstem and Stockholm Environment Institute just came up with, it's actually the richest 10% of the world contributed to 52% of carbon emissions, whereas the poorest 50% contributes to 4%. So I asked ourselves, okay, the more money you have in the current system, the more you are heating up the earth. What will you do to cool down the temperature of your capital? And two is how do we contribute to 7.6 billion of us doing that together? And the third is how can this be all about collaboration and fulfilling everyone basic needs? And with that I'd like to invite you to help all of us solve this wicked problem together. I personally am focusing on how do we not solve the problem with the same mindset that created the problem. So please drop me a line@deannaryptolab.net I have amazing collaborators like the center for Mindful Learning, the Stanford ZeroDev project, Holochain, and I would love to have more of you on board. So thank you. Thank you very much Vienna. And thank you everyone who participated in this wonderful webinar. We are. We reached two hours and a half and I think everybody deserved now to take some time to digest all this great information that we've heard through the webinar. I would like to thank all the organizers and all the speakers and thank you very much for keep coloring our financial and political system in green. Thank you so much. Keep safe everyone and hope to see you soon in a greener planet. Thank you. Thank you, Christina.

Thank you very much.

Thanks everyone. I think this was an amazing session.

Yes. And we will have a Streamyard green drink session next weekend.

Great. Thank you, Mira.

Thank you very much, Vienna. Wonderful having you with us.

My pleasure.