Unprecedented times call for unprecedented measures
The 75th anniversary of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) is following an unprecedented set of cascading global calamities, with the world in a quadruple global crisis: health, environmental, economic, and social. This year, UNGA is being held virtually for the first time in the history of its existence with pre-recorded videos.
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is more urgent than ever, as is our reliance on digital technologies to accomplish it.
A permeating undercurrent of all this chaos appears to be the ticking climate bomb, already apparent to many and continuing with hurricanes, fires, and now, some of the longest power outages in history in North America.
Unprecedented times call for unprecedented measures
Without ubiquitous accounting measures and standards to manage the remaining carbon budget and all contributions to the Paris Agreement, we run the risk of continuing to tackle the climate crisis in silos, with fragmented and disparate approaches.
The opportunity to seize involves a fundamental change in our behaviours, economic thinking, policies, business practices, and day to day life. We must find our shared values and common practices and collaborate in a way that moves us towards a global economy centered on improving the resilience of what connects all of us: planet Earth.
"The metrics used to measure progress with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a good place to start. In addition to using them to report on governments, we can apply them to individual companies and projects," says MIT professor Alex Pentland.
In the run up to UNGA next month, organizations working on the cutting edge of this new thinking are moving ahead at full speed and are forging new partnerships to accelerate a better future for humanity using open digital technologies to enable and accelerate resilience.
The Missing piece: integrated climate accounting
Fostering trust through technology is now possible with 'deep tech': distributed ledgers, big data and machine learning, and the ubiquitous use of IoT sensors, cameras, and satellite data. This is more relevant than ever with the urgent need to mobilize a fragmented climate action community to establish an accountability framework for tracking climate pledges.
A trusted digital infrastructure that can deliver transparency alongside privacy, and integrate the accounting of both private and public efforts is the big missing piece to manage the climate agenda. It is time to turn surveillance capitalism on its head and use technology to link data from 'surveilled' governments and companies to automatically account and report on their contributions to improving resilience to stakeholders and citizens alike.
This is what the Open Earth Foundation, a newly launched nonprofit has set out to do with the Open Climate project. Given that climate risk is not fully accounted for when it comes to valuations, accounting, indexing and investing, a distorted set of incentives continues to push the planetary ecosystem towards the brink of cascading disasters.
The Open Climate project uses open innovation and deep tech to establish a nested approach that connects the actions and incentives of individual and private bodies to sub national, national and global outcomes.
“We are focused on two core outcomes,” says Martin Wainstein, founder of the Open Earth Foundation and the Yale Open Innovation Lab: "1) restoring trust and accountability through an open global climate accounting system with consensus on the state of the planet and, 2) large scale capital deployment into securitized climate action projects that produce job creation opportunities for local communities, facilitated by decentralized finance technology and automation.”
Open Earth has partnered with organizations such as the Spatial Web Foundation and The Digital Economist to help with defining, refining and building the new human-Earth balanced global economy. Achieving the Paris Agreement is a key goal at the heart of its mission.
“The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) needs significantly more support and collaboration on digital innovation from all stakeholders in order to manage the Global Stocktakes. We have more data processing technology on our mobile phones than in the current technology we have to manage global climate accounting from countries," says Wainstein.
“This pivotal moment in the arch of human civilization calls for us to design, build planet-scale solutions to meet our planet-scale challenges. Ensuring that the Open Earth Foundation is supported by an open and interoperable Spatial Web infrastructure that can bring to bear the ethical use of exponential technologies like IoT, AI, blockchain and robotics to meet our global climate targets is one of our top priorities.” says Gabriel René, executive director of the Spatial Web Foundation.
The new economic engine
The crisis opens up an opportunity to build and deploy systems that would power a sustainable future for humanity, as captured in the Green New Deal. Business as usual is a thing of the past and it has never been more apparent than now. The new digital economy has to reflect a ‘whole system perspective’, understanding that humans are part of nature, not separate from it, and that the delicate environmental balance of Earth is the ultimate natural capital to preserve. The World Economic Forum has now set the agenda as The Great Reset of capitalism.
“Open Earth Foundation brings in the necessary technology infrastructure pieces for the climate community to converge upon in partnerships towards the global goals,” says Navroop Sahdev, founder and chief executive officer of The Digital Economist, “this is the kind of convergence of technologies as stakeholders we’ve set out to foster."
Unleashing value
“We are calling all stakeholders to converge on unleashing the economic value through accurate accounting, thus eliminating ambiguous externalities, and to innovate around new business models in alignment with human centered outcomes in service of achieving the SDGs in the next one decade,” says Sahdev.
Amidst the business community’s efforts to rethink how to do business, the key to achieving the global goals lies in inducing long term behavioral change in entire populations.
"Resilience comes from learnings shared between communities and not from top-down rules," says Pentland.
Decentralization is a key part of making collaborative peer to peer systems work and scale to achieve 'stigmergy', and particularly to empower bottom-up action. After all, global collaboration is the ultimate 'technology' we have yet to master.
