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Fourth Industrial Revolution for the Earth Series Building Block(chain)s for a Better Planet September 2018 In collaboration with PwC and Stanford Woods Institute for the EnvironmentWorld Economic Forum 2018 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system. Building Block(chain)s for a Better Planet is published by the World Economic Forum System Initiative on Shaping the Future of Environment and Natural Resource Security in partnership with PwC and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. It was made possible with funding from the MAVA Foundation. It forms part of a series of reports from the Fourth Industrial Revolution for the Earth project, run in association with the World Economic Forum Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. About “The Fourth Industrial Revolution for the Earth” series The “Fourth Industrial Revolution for the Earth” is a publication series highlighting opportunities to solve the worlds most pressing environmental challenges by harnessing technological innovations supported by new and effective approaches to governance, nancing and multistakeholder collaboration. About the World Economic Forum The World Economic Forum, committed to improving the state of the world, is the International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation. The Forum engages the foremost business, political and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas. World Economic Forum 91-93 route de la Capite CH-1223 Cologny/Geneva Switzerland3 Building Block(chain)s for a Better Planet Contents Preface The Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Earth 3 Preface 4 Foreword 5 Executive summary 7 Our planet: The challenge and opportunity 9 The building blocks: Overview of blockchain and its maturity 12 The blockchain opportunity for our environment 14 Blockchain game changers for the Earth 22 Blockchain blockers and the unintended consequences 26 Conclusions and recommendations 31 Acknowledgements 32 Annex I 33 Annex II 34 Endnotes The majority of the worlds current environmental problems can be traced back to industrialization, particularly since the “great acceleration” in global economic activity since the 1950s. While this delivered impressive gains in human progress and prosperity, it has also led to unintended consequences. Issues such as climate change, unsafe levels of air pollution, depletion of forestry, shing and freshwater stocks, toxins in rivers and soils, overowing levels of waste on land and in oceans, and loss of biodiversity and habitats are all examples of the unintended consequences of industrialization on our global environmental commons. As the Fourth Industrial Revolution gathers pace, innovations are becoming faster, more efcient and more widely accessible than ever before. Technology is becoming increasingly connected, and we are now seeing a convergence of the digital, physical and biological realms. Emerging technologies, including the Internet of Things (IoT), virtual reality and articial intelligence (AI), are enabling societal shifts as they seismically affect economies, values, identities and possibilities for future generations. There is a unique opportunity to harness the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the societal changes it triggers to help address environmental issues and transform how we manage our shared global environment. Left unchecked, however, the Fourth Industrial Revolution could have further unintended negative consequences for our global commons. For example, it could exacerbate existing threats to environmental security by further depleting global shing stocks, biodiversity and resources. Furthermore, it could create entirely new risks that will need to be considered and managed, particularly in relation to the collection and ownership of environmental data, the extraction of resources and disposal of new materials, and the impact of new advanced and automated machines.Harnessing these opportunities and proactively managing these risks will require a transformation of the current “enabling environment” for global environmental management. This includes the governance frameworks and policy protocols, investment and nancing models, the prevailing incentives for technology development, and the nature of societal engagement. This transformation will not happen automatically. It will require proactive collaboration among policy-makers, scientists, civil society, technology champions and investors. If we get it right, it could create a sustainability revolution. Working with experts from the environmental and technology agenda, the “Fourth Industrial Revolution for the Earth” project is producing a series of insight papers designed to illustrate the potential of Fourth Industrial Revolution innovations and their application to the worlds most pressing environmental challenges. Collectively and individually, these papers offer insights into the emerging opportunities and risks of this fast-moving agenda, highlighting the roles various actors could play to ensure these technologies are harnessed and scaled effectively. The papers are not intended to be conclusive, but rather to act as a stimulant providing overviews that provoke further conversation among diverse stakeholders about how new technologies driven by the Fourth Industrial Revolution could play a signicant role in global efforts to build environmentally sustainable economies, helping to provide foundations for further collaborative work as this dynamic new agenda evolves. This particular paper looks at blockchain and the planet. Previous papers in the “Fourth Industrial Revolution for the Earth” series have looked at how the Fourth Industrial Revolution could transform ocean management, enable sustainable cities, and build an inclusive bio-economy that preserves biodiversity, as well as examining how articial intelligence could be harnessed to address economic, social and governance challenges related to Earth systems.4 Building Block(chain)s for a Better Planet Foreword Blockchain 1is a foundational emerging technology of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, much like the internet was for the previous (or third) industrial revolution. Its dening features are its distributed and immutable ledger and advanced cryptography, which enable the transfer of a range of assets among parties securely and inexpensively without third-party intermediaries. It is also democratized by design unlike the platform companies of todays internet allowing participants in the network to own a piece of the network by hosting a node (a device on the blockchain). Blockchain is more than just a tool to enable digital currencies. At its most fundamental level, it is a new, decentralized and global computational infrastructure that could transform many existing processes in business, governance and society. Blockchain has received considerable hype, ranging from “cryptomania” in the trading markets in 2017 to widespread discussions about the breadth and depth of its potential impact across public and private sectors and society in general. It has also invited scepticism related to its scalability and the high-energy use of early blockchain platforms. 2As of early July 2018, the total cryptocurrency market cap (spanning 1,629 currencies) stands at about $254.67 billion. 3As the architecture for this transformational technology matures and as both the blockchain hype and scepticism begin to rationalize, there is a signicant opportunity to shape how blockchain is developed and deployed. A number of blockchain applications and platforms are becoming widely known, starting with Bitcoin, which pioneered cryptocurrency (and crypto-assets), followed by Ethereum, which as a platform for building decentralized applications through smart contracts has inspired a whole new “token economy”. The emergence of applications in voting, digital identity, nancing and health illustrate how blockchain can potentially be used to address global challenges. 4There is now also emerging enthusiasm about blockchains potential to support global efforts to advance environmental sustainability. To date, however, there has been little appraisal of the use-cases or systematic orientation to vital environmental opportunities and challenges, much less of how to build the public- private collaborations and platforms that will be needed to realize these nascent opportunities. This report focuses on the application of blockchain to address pressing environmental challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss and water scarcity. It looks at emerging applications, including those that might be the biggest game changers in managing our global environmental commons, while assessing the potential challenges and developing recommendations to address them. Some of these applications could dramatically improve current systems and approaches, while others could completely transform the way humans interact with and manage our environmental stability and natural resources. Throughout this assessment, it is emphasized that the potential for blockchain lies in its architectural ability to shift, and potentially upend, traditional economic systems potentially transferring value from shareholders to stakeholders as distributed solutions increasingly take hold. If harnessed in the right way, blockchain has signicant potential to enable a move to cleaner and more resource-preserving decentralized solutions, unlock natural capital and empower communities. This is particularly important for the environment, where global commons and non-nancial value challenges are currently so prevalent. However, if history has taught us anything, it is that such transformative changes will not happen automatically. They will require deliberate collaboration between diverse stakeholders ranging from technology industries through to environmental policy-makers, underpinned by new platforms that can support these stakeholders to advance not just a technology application, but the systems shift that will enable it to truly take hold. It is our hope that the following overview of the opportunities, risks and suggested next steps will stimulate stakeholders to embark on an exciting new action agenda that builds blockchains for a better planet. Dominic Waughray Head of the Centre for Global Public Goods, World Economic Forum Sheila Warren Project Head, Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology, World Economic Forums Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution Dr Celine Herweijer Partner, PwC UK Innovation and Sustainability Leader5 Building Block(chain)s for a Better Planet Executive summary Background Blockchain has the potential to transform how humans transact. It is a decentralized electronic ledger system that creates a cryptographically secure and immutable record of any transaction of value, whether it be money, goods, property, work or votes. This architecture can be harnessed to facilitate peer-to-peer payments, manage records, track physical objects and transfer value via smart contracts. This potential to fundamentally redene how business, governance and society operate has generated considerable hype about blockchain. Despite this hype, it remains a nascent technology with considerable challenges that need to be overcome, from user trust and adoption through to technology barriers (including interoperability and scalability), security risks, legal and regulatory challenges, and blockchains current energy consumption. However, as the technology matures and its application across sectors and systems grows, there is both a challenge and an opportunity to realize blockchains potential not just for nance or industry, but for people and the planet. This opportunity comes at a critical juncture in humanitys development. As a result of the “great acceleration” in human economic activity since the mid- 20th century, which has yielded impressive improvements in human welfare, research from many Earth-system scientists suggests that life on land could now be entering a period of unprecedented environmental systems change. Fortunately, an opportunity is also emerging to harness blockchain (and other innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution) to address six of todays most pressing environmental challenges that demand transformative action: climate change, natural disasters, biodiversity loss, ocean-health deterioration, air pollution and water scarcity. Many of these opportunities extend far beyond “tech for good” considerations and are connected to global economic, industrial and human systems. Blockchain provides a strong potential to unlock and monetize value that is currently embedded (but unrealized) in environmental systems, and there is a clear gap within the market. In the rst quarter of 2018, for example, 412 blockchain projects raised more than $3.3 billion through initial coin offerings (ICOs). 5Less than 1% of these were in the energy and utilities sector, representing around $100 million of investment, or around just 3% of the total investment for the quarter. Principal ndings Our research and analysis identied more than 65 existing and emerging blockchain use-cases for the environment through desk-based research and interviews with a range of stakeholders at the forefront of applying blockchain across industry, big tech, entrepreneurs, research and government. Blockchain use-case solutions that are particularly relevant across environmental applications tend to cluster around the following cross-cutting themes: enabling the transition to cleaner and more efcient decentralized systems; peer- to-peer trading of resources or permits; supply-chain transparency and management; new nancing models for environmental outcomes; and the realization of non-nancial value and natural capital. The report also identies enormous potential to create blockchain-enabled “game changers” that have the ability to deliver transformative solutions to environmental challenges. These game changers have the potential to disrupt, or substantially optimize, the systems that are critical to addressing many environmental challenges. A high-level summary of those game changers is outlined below: “See-through” supply chains: blockchain can create undeniable (and potentially unavoidable) transparency in supply chains. Recording transactional data throughout the supply chain on a blockchain and establishing an immutable record of provenance (i.e. origin) offers the potential for full traceability of products from source to store. Providing such transparency creates an opportunity to optimize supply- a
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