disCarbon creates transparent and verifiable carbon retirement tools available as public goods within the Ethereum ecosystem.
Our aims are:
We believe that drastic action is required to avert the disastrous consequences of climate change and that web3 offers the tools and hope to coordinate and enable this action.
In order to achieve these goals, disCarbon’s initial focus is carbon footprint tools that show people how they can reduce their impact on the planet and minimize their contribution to climate change. Moreover, our tools allow people to offset the emissions due to their actions using tokenized carbon credits directly on-chain. These tools demonstrate how easy it is to use and retire on-chain carbon credits in order to drive the adoption of tokenized carbon among crypto-natives and provide a showcase for a legitimate and tangible use case of blockchain for those less familiar with the technology, both within the traditional carbon credit industry, and beyond.
Why does disCarbon use on-chain carbon credits? We believe that the traditional voluntary carbon market has its place in pricing the negative impact our actions have on the planet and results in worthwhile projects that do positive work and help preserve the health of our planet. Currently, however, a lot of value in the existing market is extracted by middlemen and not the underlying carbon offset projects that actually do climate-positive work. Our hope is that the on-chain market will make the existing system fairer and more accessible. To this end, we want to create tools that increase the adoption of the on-chain carbon market with the ultimate goal of driving more value to climate-positive projects. This in turn will enable more carbon offset projects to come to life.
Founded in May 2022, our first tool is a flight emission offsetter which allows anyone to compensate their air travel induced carbon emission within seconds. Only the start and destination airport must be provided in order to calculate the distance and typical carbon emission. The flight offsetter is a pure decentralized application with no backend communication: The emission calculation runs directly in the browser and the retirement occurs on-chain. The carbon emission calculation has been benchmarked against the best in the industry and shown to be simple, reliable and accurate.
The flight emission offsetter will be extended with smart contract based accounting and POAP issuance in order to incentivize users to offset their carbon emissions. In a last step, we will additionally allow the user to transparently choose which carbon reduction project to source the carbon credits from.
We also developed the 'Climate Friendly Devcon VI' dapp. This was a community-led initiative to make Devcon VI carbon neutral . Devcon is the largest Ethereum conference and took place this year in Bogotá, Colombia. discarbon.earth provided tools which enabled attendees to voluntarily contribute to a carbon offset pool and vote on the choice of underlying carbon reduction project. We accumulated over 400 tons of carbon certificates which will be used to retire tokens from the Cordillera Azul REDD+ Project.
Standard emission offset tools are just the beginning, however, and we look forward to exploring other amazing opportunities that programmable carbon enables.