Hey Kevin, support nature based projects with NCT would be ideal IMO. The price of NCT has fallen this week, so current costs with these high quality credits would be:
Phase 1 would now cost $2.60 * 1862 = $4841.2
With NCT Gitcoin can event retire one of Verra’s premier projects - Rimba Raya Biodiversity reserve
The quality of the Verra credits, available in the Toucan NCT pool aren’t in doubt, and we paused bridging as we continue discussion in Verra. The legitimacy the tokenized carbon assets brought onto EVM blockchains can be trusted in terms of the rigour and security ensured in the bridging process.
I would definitely opt for high-quality, nature based credits to avoid projects with questionable additionality and risk greenwashing. With Toucan having brought tens of millions of credits on-chain it‘s proven itself enough to recommend NCT.
If Gitcoin considers NBO, they could selectively retire the Pacajai project. You can read about it here: [www].notion.so/offsetra/Pacajai-REDD-Project-84daa5d46df14f319bed2edfde2081b0
This project holds VCS and CCB certification (Climate, Community and Biodiversity). These KPIs ensure the project is having robust impact across both environmental and social domains.
This is really interesting. NCT is the highest quality and most liquid nature based solution/credits on-chain. Plus the price of NCT is so good right now - would be an affordable, high quality offsetting instrument!
“If the question is can we ever, at 5 bucks a ton, produce something that’s
meaningful, I think the answer is no” - Danny Cullenward, the policy director at
CarbonPlan, a nonprofit climate research organization.
Writing as a member of the Gitcoin community — I love this. Gitcoin is the right organization to pioneer climate action in Web3. I support the proposal in full.
When it comes to how to bring the proposal to life, I think Gitcoin has a real opportunity here. I’d love to see the DAO use its expertise in internet-scale coordination to develop new ways of building a climate action program. I’m working on a few ideas here with some collaborators, we’ll share more soon — quadratic climate action?
The question is: how can we use the resources we devote to climate action to catalyze the most impact?
I see a few avenues:
Financial
Looking backward
~$10k is not a huge amount, but it’s not nothing. I’d love to hear proposals from the community on which carbon projects most align with Gitcoin values, and selectively pick those from their respective carbon pools for retirement. We could quite easily build a retirement portfolio that we want to talk about. [ a bit about Filecoin Green’s selection tool ]
Looking forward
This is a bigger opportunity in my opinion. Much of the highest quality carbon credit supply is not available on-chain right now — it’s not even available in the big registries like Verra yet. I’d love for the community to develop tools to identify impact projects to support on a regular basis. This let’s us direct funding to the highest impact project categories in a flexible way.
We have the privilege of working in a sector that is very comfortable with risk and moonshot ideas. I would love it if Gitcoin took some informed risks here and devoted capital to some out-there ideas that just might make a huge difference.
Governance / coordination
Composable governance processes mean we can lift and shift established Web3 decision-making patterns and apply them toward climate portfolio curation. At the moment, there are a few industry leaders that are thinking more in terms of impact than image. Stripe and Microsoft stand out. We should take a page from their book, and explore a Web3-native way of making sense of the highest-leverage use of our resources.
To start this could be as simple as a few people monitoring new on-chain supply, and the community quadratically selecting a portfolio to invest in each quarter. This is a common need and we can easily build a tool / workflow useful to other DAOs. More on this below. (Related — is anyone working on a carbon curation DAO? Noting that this would definitely require deep expertise to be credible.)
More broadly, how can we experiment with Web3 institution-building to create adaptive processes of deploying capital into the highest impact project categories, based on the scientific evidence? Web3 moves fast — can we lead the way and front-run the world by surfacing and accelerating the most promising new projects and technologies? Getting $30k to a promising new project could accelerate scaling by a year — which could make a huge difference to our future.
Gitcoin leads when it comes to building Web3 culture. The greenpilled meme and the narrative building around cryptonative regeneracy is pushing and pulling our communities in the right direction. The money Gitcoin devotes to climate action will help, but continuing to activate the community and create the expectation for climate consciousness amongst Web3 builders and users could be a force multiplier on any funding we provide.
This will obviously work best if it’s true to our values. But generally, this means really leaning in and devoting resources beyond the initial retirement funding. Any education campaigns should be optimize to increase both the motivation and the ability with which others in Web3 can take action to support the Earth.
Overall I’m proposing that we take advantage of our strengths to make sure the efforts we make towards regenerating the Earth have the highest impact. This means using our resources to push the boundary — investing in next gen carbon projects, establishing forkable processes for DAOs to take climate action, and telling the story in an engaging way.
Steps forward
First step is to choose which carbon tokens we want to retire to offset historical emissions. What does the Gitcoin community value? Technology-based? Nature-based? Established registries? Or new methodologies?
My vote would be for the community to collectively design a retirement portfolio that showcases the best and brightest of Web3 carbon. I can see a few options to achieve this:
Delegate to a sub-committee
Run a Twitter poll or two
Put it to a quadratic vote
A round of quadratic matching for a few carbon credit types in the next grants round
Any other ideas?
To achieve this, we’ll need to identify which tokenized carbon credits are eligible to be included in the portfolio. This is pretty important — retiring low quality credits A: does not constitute legitimate climate action and B: would expose the DAO to negative press if (when) someone digs into the retirements. Transparency
Beyond the obvious candidates, I would personally advocate for us to save some funding to deploy into the next-gen and forward carbon credits that will be available on-chain soon. And of course, memes are everything — the storytelling should get a lot of emphasis.
This collective retirement portfolio curation process is a community pattern we will be able to reuse … this past week in Paris the ReFi community came together and hatched some ideas … more soon™️
Climate action isn’t a “thing” to be “done” — climate consciousness is a mindset to adopt. It’s one of the things that makes climate change such a challenging issue to address: humans want a finish line, and there’s no finish line here. There is no battle to be won.
Gitcoin is a Schelling point for the hopeful. Let’s lead by showing an optimistic, organized, cogent example for taking catalytic climate action using these global coordination tools we’re all uncovering together.
Great proposal discussion and thread. I’d recommend also looking at Carbon Collectible NFTs (ccnfts.io) - a super innovative approach to ensuring nature-based communities that are traditionally locked out of carbon markets can not only be included in the carbon offset economy but can generate tangible high-quality offset projects.
I’m not affiliated with them in any way, just love the model.
Hi all, I’m hoping we can revive this discussion in the new year.
Now that the Alpha Round is complete and Grants is live, I think a nice way to both solve this logjam of deciding how to allocate funding to different classes of offers and dogfood the new protocol would be to run a quadratic funding round matched by Gitcoin’s own funds to allocate across different carbon credit projects.
For instance, we could select a few projects from each carbon credit pool (BCT, NCT, UBO and NBO, with MCO2 being another option but treated as a bundle of 4 projects rather than a single project)
There two potential mechanisms for then allocating capital amongst those
choices:
The community would then fund these projects just like any other grant round, and the funds would be used to retire credits from the selected project/pool.
Alternatively, the new Snapshot Gitcoin Passport integration could be used to allow any GTC holders with a passport to vote on how the Gitcoin treasury’s funds would be allocated across a variety of carbon credit types via quadratic voting.
There is some concern about the DAO getting front-run and all of a given project getting used up before the DAO has a chance… so we might have to limit to only projects with relatively large volumes available relative to the size of the retirements to be made.
As linked in the original post above, the KlimaDAO digital carbon dashboard has a list of how many credits from each project are present in each pool, we’d just need to narrow down that list to projects that fit Gitcoin’s constraints (mostly around having enough supply)
Does that sound like a reasonable approach?
If the approach sounds reasonable, happy to start the ball rolling by providing some info on a few projects in each pool I think might be a good fit
Hey, thank you for bringing this conversation back to life!
Really timely, as you said, with the ability to use either the Grant Stack to QF fund our Carbon offsetting, or using a Quadratic Vote on Snapshot.
I’m looping in @M0nkeyFl0wer and @shawn16400 to help think through the voting design, and Ben especially to ensure we’re building an impactful offsetting process.
