Open Earth Foundation launched its Ocean Program to build the digital architecture needed to conserve 30% of the global ocean and solve the environmental problems that negatively affect it. The Ocean Program leverages the Foundation’s expertise in emerging digital technologies, including AI and blockchain, to scale marine conservation and outcome-based conservation finance.
There exists few financial mechanisms to protect ocean health that scale up to what we need to do to conserve the ocean. Currently, many marine conservation efforts rely on philanthropy, which is not always scalable, or are turning towards carbon markets, which were not designed for ocean solutions and which focus primarily on climate. Efforts to protect the ocean and its ecosystems are however very important for a variety of ocean health metrics, such as marine biodiversity or marine pollution. Not only do these issues affect marine life, but they also affect human health, such as through seafood, for example.
Given the specificities of ocean systems and their complexities, we need to build adequate financial mechanisms for the protection and restoration of marine ecosystems.
To this end, we have yet to leverage the full potential of digital technologies, such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, big data and IoT to scale ocean conservation. The rise and maturity of these emerging technologies provide opportunities for existing (e.g. Regen) and new platforms to finance and scale ocean conservation.
The Ocean Program leverages the Open Earth Foundation’s expertise in emerging digital technologies, including AI and blockchain, to scale marine conservation and outcome-based conservation finance.
Specifically, we are working on a new class of marine ecosystem credits that center around scientific integrity, equity and scalability. We are building the digital infrastructure and developing protocols and methodologies to support these efforts. In parallel, we are also developing free open-source tools to help lower the cost of environmental assessments in the ocean and to enable solutions to scale across vast swathes of the ocean.
Furthermore, we are researching and developing methodologies to apply Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs) in the process of credit issuance and validation—exploring interoperability between Cosmos DIDs and Hyperledger DIDs.
The initial focus of the Ocean Program is the development of marine ecosystem credits as financial instruments to support the conservation and restoration of ocean ecosystems. These ecological issues include ecosystem collapses due to biodiversity decline and biomass loss, as well as chemical pollution (including plastic pollution) and acidification. These intermingled issues are primarily caused by anthropogenic global warming due to carbon dioxide (CO$_2$) emissions, overexploitation of marine resources and the loss of coastal habitats. Globally, the ocean has been absorbing roughly one quarter of anthropogenic CO$_2$ emissions, which alters the chemistry of seawater and causes ocean acidification. In turn, marine ecosystems collapse and ocean acidification reduces the ocean’s capacity to absorb excess atmospheric CO$_2$ and to buffer climate change.
With the goal to speed up the protection of the ocean and its ecosystems and scale conservation finance, we develop methodologies and standards for issuing and verifying marine ecosystem credits that center around scientific integrity, equity and scalability.
An overview of our proposed design is shown in the Figure 2 diagram. Some key features of our marine ecosystem credits include:
(1) modularity, meaning the class of marine ecosystem credits includes stackable credits such as marine plastic credits and/or biodiversity credits;
(2) the inclusion of the quantified scientific uncertainty in the credits’ valuation;
(3) accounting through a blockchain ledger like Regen;
Figure 1: our objective is the intersection of these values.
(4) embedded funding for the Measurement, Reporting & Verification (MRV) process; and
(5) the certification through an open-source, transparent system that the credit verification and the credit issuance are done independently.
Figure 2: overview of our Marine Ecosystem Credits. Modular credits can be claimed within a defined area (shaded in light blue). For each type and quantity $N_i$ of credit claimed, independent MRV is conducted, taking the additionality of these stackable credits into account. The value of these credits is modulated by the certainty of the claim $P_i$. A third party oversees that the methodologies are respected and that the MRV was done independently by verified certifiers. The credits are then issued on the Regen Ledger. CMAR: Corredor Marino del Pacífico Este Tropical, or Corridor of the Eastern Tropical Pacific (CMAR). Cocos: Cocos Island National Park, Costa Rica.
The first key feature is modularity. Our class of marine ecosystem credits is comprised of stackable, independent credits, such as marine plastic credits, marine biodiversity credits, clean water credits or Blue Carbon credits, as illustrated in the Figure 3 example. This means that taking into account additionality, if a singular effort can be rewarded by two or more types of credits, this effort can claim these different types of credits.
Figure 3: example of different marine ecosystem credits claimed within an area (the Subregion). Each square represents a project area with defined spatial boundaries. In this example, most projects claim a single type of credit, with the exception of the purple square, which claim both marine plastic and Blue Carbon credits.
The second feature is the inclusion of the scientific uncertainty in the valuation of the credits. There currently exist several “high quality carbon credits” on the voluntary carbon markets (VCM) [Carbon Offset Guide; Environmental Defense Fund, 2021], whose quality is often linked to the certainty in measurements and the side effects of the operations. Beyond the binary qualification of “high quality”, there exist very few mechanisms to reflect a credit’s quality. Additionally, due to the complexity of ocean systems, there are major gaps in scientific knowledge around the quantification of marine ecosystem services [NASEM, 2021; Boyd et al., 2022]. The purpose of including the scientific uncertainty in the valuation is to reward high-quality projects and to offer a financial incentive to do rigorous MRV.