​Designing Next-Gen Digital Climate Infrastructure & Systematic Valuing of Nature - Bangkok 2024

[Music] hello hello hello great so with uh uh the honor of seeing some amazing friends uh in the audience here and also uh much gratitude to funding the commons and incredible people here like waking up so early in morning and being here is uh itself a dedication commitment um I have the honor of uh sharing about 20 minutes with you um of essentially my Reflections and struggles over the last four years of trying to figure out how do we actually Bridge uh the important tools we have available from the web 3 world with the most important crisis we have in the real world um and I gave this a very ambitious title I called it designing the next generation of digital climate infrastructure and creating systematic valuing of nature um but uh I I want to sort of dive into a few uh stories and Reflections and then we sort of hopefully leave left space at the end for Sation with you guys uh about this how do I advance so um you know we just had the US elections uh and the results were uh surprising to some people and not surprising to other people but I think it does pose some important questions about what it looks like for uh climate change for the next four years right you know the crypto prices are doing extremely well but uh unfortunately uh so are weather uh disasters and also temperature so this is actually one of the most striking graphs I've ever seen in terms of looking at the uh change over time over the daily sea surface temperature and we see 2023 actually having consistently broken um historical records of warming ever and then 2024 we're actually breaking those records again you know like pretty consistently as well and the left here are two pictures uh from two uh events that happened recently one is uh in Spain and extreme flooding event the other one is uh hurricane Milton which uh created uh one of the largest um standing sort of flooding in in the US so how do we get here like what are the sort of consequences and and reasoning that actually led us to such uh Dire Straits and I sort of broke it up into a four uh or five different categories we won't get into all the details but basically energy economics CO2 concentrations destruction of the commons profit maximization and then finally class of civilization and actually human societal operating systems um so this is a really interesting book uh this book I found um through a recommendation friend but essentially it talks about the way that humans have used energy over the last um 2,000 years um and you know we went through a huge step change actually in our ability to unlock the ability to use stored energy in form of fossil fuels right starting from L really the 1870s or so and then really kind of going through today um and this is actually an incredible achievement right like I don't want to vilify the f industry we actually benefit daily from the ability to generate power at scale for human civilization uh and this is a really interesting graph of how GDP per country is correlated heavily with energy use right from this graph the first thing you can see is that every single Rich GDP country uses much more energy and there are currently today no low energy rich countries uh I think also just asked a question like what are we going to do if we actually want to liberate and give more people opportunity to people on the on the left hand Corner how do we actually you know mitigate that with CO2 emissions um and cor you know the corresponding Coral of that emissions is this picture right which is the total amount of emissions we have um on a country scale so um China is now today 25% 27% of global emissions uh that is pretty significant um as a world but I want to keep reminding people actually of cumulative missions right this is something that we don't talk about much at cop and other places where the United States actually collectively over the course of its own existence has emitted about 20 uh 4% of total cumul emissions around the world uh and right now we don't have any system actually to either recognize or to actually um require responsibility from cumulative missions um from historic energy use and finally you know this is kind of where we're going as a society for CO2 um we have this gradual accumulation of CO2 over last um 200 years um and we have this in my opinion largely fanciful idea that we're going to somehow go through a cliff process and actually drop that emissions dramatically so far none of the things that we have data for seem to suggest that we're going to go through that cliff and the other dependent of this is you know for places where um there's a lot of standing Forest um we've also been able to take a lot from the world so this is a just a picture of global deforestation uh in concentration of you know millions of hectares um and the places where there's a lot of dark colors are places where we've removed a lot of rainforest um as well so um what can we do to fix this right and I I don't say that you know these Solutions are at all either um comprehensive or even um uh sufficient but I think it it is useful to think about some of the ideas and tools uh that we have at our disposal and and then this is kind of hopefully the you know setting a stage for future great conversations today um so the first one is actually this lovely lady so just a show of hands if you've heard of el a before um and show of hands if you haven't uh great um so David here in the audience and I first connected over a blog post that he had wrote about Eleanor and actually this is how we sort of met each other on the internet um during covid but Elanor actually holds a remarkable distinction of being the first female to actually win a nob priz in economics which is incredible and more incredible actually is what she did so she wrote this book called governing the commons um and it reflected a lot about this idea of tragedy Commons so I'm sure everyone knows tragedy Commons in fact climate change is probably the most tragedy Commons example we use but her argument actually was that this tragedy was neither inevitable nor uh predestined and instead what she said was first of all we keep teaching little kids in economics that there is inherent human greed and anytime you see a commment you know try to take as much of it as you can because other people can take it from you and so we are priming entire generations of of people actually to live with this fear that tragic commment is a is a is a financial consequence and then she actually found many examples of societies where there was a common resource pool and people were able to sustain using it for a few hundred years and there was no evidence that there needed to be a tragic commment and so she found these eight rules over you know few Decades of research that sort of allowed people to hold on to their Commons and actually govern them and during Co I started a part-time PhD program where I tried to figure out can we use like Dows and and digital governance tools actually to encode these eight principles into things that actually can be used today um and one of the simplest ones I think really is the fact that um you know like three and four is like we have to have areas actually just go like we'd have to areas for first we have to Define what the common resource is two um we have to figure out how do we actually fit the control of the common resources into local circumstance three we have to allow the individuals to feel like they can participate in the ongoing decision- making about that common and four we got to continually monitor it right and there's all the rules that that are here but these four rules I think are totally encodable to today with the technology we have in this room and this is kind of the sort of direction of travel for for the next few slides is that we actually have the ability to use her Nobel prizewinning research and actually protect the commons that are essential for our civilization um a small note about carbon credits and carbon markets uh this is particular area that I spent the last 40 years in um I growing a bit disillusioned or at least like sort of more aware of the limitations of what's Happening Here um but I think that the Crux of this right and and I think the beauty that attracting media carbon markets in the initial beginning is the idea that there is an opportunity to get people rewarded for using uh technology to remove CO2 right and if you go back to the original slides I had earlier we are living through this age of massive CO2 emissions and what we want to do actually is to create a a parallel economy to actually reduce CO2 at scale as well and the carbon markets theoretically provide this framework where the more CO2 you remove the more money you get paid now the limitations are one the market is Tiny it's about 2 billion dollars for the volunteer market today that's less than the market cap of most crypto companies and two um there is no active incentive for purchase like why should people actually show up wake up in the morning excited to buy these um sort of invisible credits um unless they have some reason to to do that so um I'm sure we'll hear later today from you know people in the audience like David about the incredible tools we have now to actually watch the world and sort of and and visualize it right and I won't go into the details there but I would say that we have now amazing opportunities to understand and actually monitor the world we live in this is kind of critical actually for the next few stages of this uh conversation um and and this is actually where I'm spending a lot more of my time right now which is saying you know we need to actually go through a systematic reassignment of the value that nature has so Global GDP today is roughly if you add all the countries together around $130 trillion or so and this fascinating report from the we says that actually the ongoing existence of nature is also roughly worth 130 trillion doll like that is a lot of money right the carbon markets are $2 billion voluntary wise and about you know know 7 800 billion um less than a trillion uh compliance wise nature itself actually is worth about 100 x that uh and so here's a very you know simple but I think effective illustration which is today the global economy uh dominates every single conversation right any decision you want to make you say well is is it good for business if it's not good for business no one ever is going to do something about it and so we have zero assignment of value for nature and we have on the scale here you know hundred trillion dollar like what we need to go in the future is actually to say okay we as people who live on the planet we recognize that nature actually does add a lot of value for us it's commiserate in scale to the human GDP and we need to go from this idea of instrumental value which is the tree is valuable in so far as I can turn it into wood actually to intrinsic value which is the tree ongoing as itself is standing there has naturally created value and uh and so in my research about what this looks like in human society and terminology we have this interesting term called payment for environmental services and uh you know if you haven't heard of this term before essentially the idea that there actually is value that nature creates for us and we should be paying for that environmental service now the problem here is if you look at the left hand sort of pillar of this you see that the people were supposed to be paying the the sellers ofmental services are farmers land owners and others which are mostly human pictorials so we're still trying to figure out ways to pay the humans right for the Environmental Services that nature itself is creating and and I think this is actually kind of let's say call this 1.0 payment for Amal services and uh what I think we need to do is actually to go to 2.0 which is we need to start actually paying nature itself so this is some of the coolest things I've seen in the world today is actually that we are starting to assign legal personhood to rivers and other natural um resources so this River in uh New Zealand actually was the first one in the world to actually have legal standing uh as as a river and so what it what that allows it to do is it can actually Sue um any abuse like pollution or illegal dumping in the river and also it can own property and and enter contracts like a person and you're like this might be crazy right but actually we have now as human society decided corporations are legal people and so they have we've already given these rights to corporations but uh and so this is just one more step and then this is not the only one there's in the Canadian river that also got this um you know sort of new uh designation and now there's really interesting uh legal research out there about nature as cian beings and can River be legal people so this is one cor next slide is it frozen this is actually so groundbreaking that it broke the PowerPoint so we're just going to pause here and reflect on the consequences of this but just a show of hands yeah or okay well maybe we could take a question first while we wait for this yes please River so if the river is legally incorporated as a person and it has rights it can enter into contracts how do we make sure that the interests of the river are actually protected rather than it being co-opted for profit like you know the yeah exactly yes so that's a great question and so the next slide is about how do we actually make that happen so thank you so much for doing that but but what's interesting is unfortunately um nature does not speak to us today right and that's going to change imminently I think it's going to change in the next six months but today how do we get nature actually to have standing in the world and this is an interesting kind of uh uh article right um that was written by a lawyer that said it's been seven years in the ganes and the uh yam yamuna rivers in India and the uh wani rivers in New Zealand have been made legal standing what does that look like actually in practice um and the one way to actually reflect is actually is the top is actually saying how do we start appointing nature to the board of companies so going to the themes that we had earlier it's like we are living in a world today where we have first classed we have made like sort of very core to protect the rights of private property and the rights of Corporations and some individual human freedoms we are totally negligent in the ability to assign any sort of value or sorry any stand of um protection to this intangible concept called nature that we live through so how do we actually first class nature into a human society and I think it actually looks a little like this which is we start appointing representation on the board of companies and the board of directors actually has the ability to decide executive pay to decide you know hiring decisions decide cultural fits right these are kind of core governance actually for Human Society and have people who represent nature at scale now there's a core question which is how do you make sure those humans are not bad actors that they're actually doing the job that they're supposed to be and that comes to the second stage which is now the ability to monitor the planet itself so here's my final proposition and then we'll sort of maybe go into a Q&A or or just discussions which is we should be able to create not only legal representation but Financial capital for nature and if you try to go to HSBC or one of the Thai Banks you say I want to open a bank account for the Amazon rainforest you're going to have a hard time actually doing that for you but with these things with digital wallets we can do that today and once we actually open a digital wallet we now have have the ability to actually represent a bank account for that particular natural Capital the second stage then is you have to monitor the use of the proceeds and this is where all of the monitoring stuff that we've talked about before and after are going to come into making sure that the money is being adequately used the third is we got to go find jurisdictions where there are desire right at a sovereign level actually to hold these bank accounts and make sure that they're being used in the right way and I would argue that there's this really interesting country here in Asia called Bhutan uh that had the chance to meet the king and the prime minister of and I think they actually have the opportunity to become like a green Switzerland for holding the treasuries of all these nature bank accounts and finally just kind of give you a sense of scale Switzerland actually today uh has about $9 trillion of AUM right for a small you know few million people and the GDP of of some number Switzerland actually is now the de facto storage capital of cap know Storage Center of capital in the world right and this is I think something we can actually do for nature itself so just to make sure I repeat the idea you know to make it very simple my proposition is that on the back of the legal personhood we had before we now actually give Financial standing to companies by using digital wallets to hold the money using tools like all the sensing we have available to make sure that the money is being well spent on the preservation and ongoing uh advocacy of Nature and finding small sovereigns in the world that have the ability to create all of the rules and regulations we need to kind of containerize this and finally seeing you know path to the future of how do we actually get trillions of dollars into these bank accounts that on that that are essentially ongoing endowments for nature itself and so that I think is my version of funding the commons um and we have about 3 minutes to do Q&A please um I I think that's a brilliant idea to have nature present itself um I'm not trying to challenge it but what I'm trying to figure out is that um you see it's still the human mind behind to Define what is the best for example for the river and then when there's a human mind involved or Human Institution involved then it's again go back to the old game you know there's politics there's like different Power trying to balance so how can you argue like opening a crypto account could you you know fundamentally change the situation as long as there's Human Institution or human mind behind thank you yeah thank you um maybe interest I would take two or three questions at time and I'll just say something and then and then I'll s give the floor so anticipating maybe some of your answer um let's say there are no humans and it's only uh uh AI that is imbued and trained with the consciousness of nature uh what happens in like a rogue AI situation like like princess monoke if yeah that's one of my favorite movies like let's say there's this like AI Spirit representing the forest and the humans are just like chopping it down and it's just like all right we tried lawyers we tried everything else like it's time to fight back yeah maybe one or two more I I can just project yes uh where do your original capital for these natural assets come from especially given the fact that something like a River or a rainforest doesn't necessarily respect Sovereign borders than what can this group of people do essentially because uh in some ways it we're moving away from maybe building Tech and mo becoming lawyers so like how can people in this group get involved and um what do you see like the transition to that and um I come from the soil world are you reaching out to indigenous populations and Elders to help with these questions because they do sense with nature and it's part of their identity um great so just kind of oh maybe one more you keep question yeah of course oh cool can can somebody hug him um so our company builds bio acoustic sensors actually the first ones that talk directly to a blockchain so I think biodiversity is probably key and then um I maybe this is a partial answer to the capital question but uh reinsurers sit on a lot of capital and they're the most incentivized to make the world resilient because otherwise their business model collapses entirely so I think the problem is like how do you leverage what's already existing in the world and convince it that it has to act on behalf of the rivers and the forests and the soil um so yeah yeah I think it's so to kind of address them you know in in in kind of Consolidated form um one thing that happened recently is truth terminal so truth terminal is um uh a demonstration of having an AI controlled Twitter account that's able to capture human attention right and if you guys have been paying attention there's actually this thing called melium Oracle which is actually started by some of the adjacent people in truth terminal which is actually doing the forestry stuff in Prototype form right now so to me the stack is very simple it's like basically global geospatial data collection into some giant database right and then objective functions train on that database to optimize for the ongoing preservation of these metrics right and then the output is essentially a mouthpiece in Twitter that actually talks to hundreds of millions of people right and uses human emotion human language basically to either shame name or actually advocate for resources for itself um that is I think buildable in the next 3 months and I think it's buildable from the people we have here and other people around the world that's just statement number one St number two is actually for the um sanctity of the the the people who actually are represented or the sanctity of the institutions that are created like how do we make sure that this is actually done properly and not subject to corruption or or destru you know sort of human you know uh problems and I would argue that in this particular case sunlight is the best disinfectant which means that if you are able to do all of these activities publicly in the view of everyone and there's a lot of people out there who are sort of morally incentivized to sort of call out bad behavior then whatever survives in that sort of like heavily monetary environment usually tends to be better behaviors on people themselves um and this is going back to the point earlier like when Ellen or ausr found her uh research she found that actually the people who lived with the land the longest are the ones most qualified actually to understand what it means to actually preserve that piece of land so there's a huge need actually to give board seats and governing positions to people who are representations of that uh Aboriginal uh leadership and I think that's a natural consequence actually of thinking through this more right she giving them the ability to interface with the traditional corporate world um and then the final piece which is actually around funding is um I completely agree insurance and reinsurance companies are the ones who actually have to carry the bags of consequence um and uh if you look at the record piece there's been like hundreds of billions of dollars of loss in the last year and a half on insurance companies so they're obviously U bottom lines being affected but even more than insurance companies I would argue is Sovereign Nation States right the last four years have showed me that actually the people who ultimately have to pick up the pieces after destruction and pay for their people's on lives are actually the countries whose people and you know uh resources are are sitting in so we have to go and talk to Sovereign Nation States and convince them to do something so with that thank you so much for your time and attention I appreciate all right thank you so much Max [Music]