World Economic Forum: Blockchain Could Help Solve the Environmental Crisis

The WEF insight emphasizes these real-world examples of how Blockchain can alter current business and institution space and improve the environmental footprint left by humanity.

The main advantages of Blockchain, according to the WEF, are enabling decentralized systems, peer-to-peer trading of natural resources or permits, supply-chain monitoring and origin tracking, new financing models, including democratizing investment, and realization of non-financial value, including the natural capital.

The report suggests that institutions, for example, could get their paperwork completely digitalized and accessible on the Blockchain. Governments would be able to reward back their citizens using the same network for collecting taxes. From a business perspective, there are many benefits too: trading energy, optimizing logistics with a single click, utilizing weather forecast information for better work planning, and much more.

The WEF report stated that “with the help of Blockchain, we can trace the route of our food from its a natural habitat to our plates and restaurants.”

The 37-page report was created with the help of PwC and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. The report divides Blockchain’s aid into six main categories – biodiversity and conservation, climate change, water security, healthy oceans, weather and disaster resilience, and clean air.

Being an ecosystem that preserves the environment, Blockchain has been called “a game-changer,” because it can give almost a universal answer to some currently critical environmental issues.

By utilizing ‘See-through’ supply chains, decentralized and sustainable resource management, new sources of sustainable finance, incentivizing circular economies, transforming carbon (and other environmental) markets, next-gen sustainability monitoring, reporting and verification, automatic disaster preparation and humanitarian relief, and Earth-management platforms, the WEF believes our environment can change for the better.

According to Dr. Celine Herweijer, a partner at PwC UK, embracing Blockchain by most of the major governments, including the USA, China, Russia, and the European Union is “unavoidable,” because of the many benefits Blockchain has offered. Governments and businesses are still holding back to such drastic changes in the way they process information.