32. GainForest (AI x climate x web3) - FtC Paris 2023

[Music] so this talk will be very quick and it's something I've been working literally my whole like uh 20 years with and it's trying to find new mechanisms to fund local communities and I will start to talk with what is gain forest and for it's a better way to do donations I will also introduce some two new ways so you're not this is one talk and you're getting three extra things out of it which is measure to earn a new way we've believe you can fund comedies at scale and label to earn even newer way even more scalable so get excited but first um let's talk about or let's listen about what we hear for today and this one I hope you can hear this probably not so so I want to you to quickly just take a moment because FTC has been czy has been amazing um but just to take a moment close your eyes and listen to the sounds of nature and imagine nature for yourself some of you might see ocean water mountains depending on where you're from forests right and it's really interesting for me as someone who um goes around the world to try to protect nature because the answer what you're seeing depends very much on the culture you're from when you're asking for example local communities they often say they see themselves and people and for me personally that was a like one of the first amazing insights that perspective matters on what nature is for us nature it's not surprising that you felt really calm and meditative because we all as human species evolved with nature came down from the trees many many millions years ago and um it has this really wonderful effect on us um that is not just storing carbon not just um purifying water but it has so many so many wonderful things um it's cultural so you felt educated you get recreated and these are the services we often times forget when we talk about nature uh communities because we often just focus on restoring the carbon thing because of climate but just to broaden the perspective nature is so much more and it's really really important to remind ourselves of that unfortunately nature is also one of the biggest contributors of the climate crisis not nature specifically but we humans and our way of interacting with nature currently like before the Industrial Revolution we had Six Trillion trees now we lost half of them and the problem with trees is as they are wonderful carbon storage um units the moment you burn a tree all the hundreds years of carbon stored in the bark is getting released in an instant and if deforestation um would be actually emitter a country it would be the third largest emitter right after the US in China so it's 18.3% um according to according to Modern like estimations that deforestation alone emits CO2 into the atmosphere and the people who can prevent us from cutting down forest the people who also cut Forest because of negative incentives are people at the front lines who are living who are depending on nature and it's our path as a community to figure out ways how we can fund these public Commons these public goods which is the natural world Itself by funding these communities that are at the front lines that often times have never even heard about web free and have not have the luxury of attending FTC for example and at gain Forest we are a nonprofit that has been working in since 2017 we were started the UN cup at a hackathon many many years ago and we have expanded to really emphasize our focus on supporting these communities um if you go to maps. gain for set app you can see currently which communities we are active with which we're helping and championing with and we are more like a meta NGO where we develop Technologies to empower local communities on the ground for example we work with the ecological Society in Bhutan we work with the communities in the Philippines with many youth um climate Warriors and we work with the youth climate in Kenya but let's talk about the problem we are here facing which is um a mislin incentive of how we funding the comment and we believe one of the things the most traditional thing how you fund currently nature how you fund Commons is through donations and we believe this system needs a crucial update and the problem is following thing if you donate you usually give money to a project you you believe in maybe your grandma told you about uh WWF so you're sending some money there and the money goes there without an understanding of what impact there is right so there's a lot of trust that this project you're giving money to delivers in its impact but there's not a lot of transparency that they do so and that creates huge I would say SPF moments of climate funding that uh that has been strucking our society first um here there's the the fake baselines on calm credits that um The Guardian article for example reveal that 90% of the car offsets that have been sold uh to Big major companies actually are wrong like our estimations internally using our algorithms think it's more like between 70 to 80% but it's huge um so that is about missing wrong impact right but there's even a worse thing people not really know about and that is what happens if there's missing transparency this one is the carrier project the world's largest carbon offset project run by a company called South Poole in Switzerland and it has gained $100 million in revenue on C Credit sales um but if you follow the money which the follow the money team did uh very um impressively in their article 100 million of dollars $40 million of dollar went to the broker and the rest 57 million if you won't be exct went to the project developer where the project developer promised promised $30 million to communities but when we looked through all the Articles and all the documents that were on Vera only $80,000 were documented and apparently the project developer CGI is not willing or not able to prove the use of the funds for its intended purposes I just leave it here so that is what happens if there's no transparency and I believe this is going to be probably like the last stagger step to uh to our common base like offset Market I believe so how can we do things better and that has been the mission of gain Force to innovate this and we believe and we we just invented a super simple trick that every every little child can came up with this um basically instead of giving the donation straight to the to the conservation project we put it into an web free escore account and then we um use kind of our tools that we had back then we had used satellite analysis to measure if the trees are still standing that triggers and measures like the impact that we can do automatically that triggers the escro account and the escro count triggers the donation and now what you see is that the causality between donation and impact is shifted around we have a caal connection between um impact and donation so less trust more transparency and we do all the things we we good in in web free of course we try to atise this project for example we create NFS that are digital um twins of the of your donation and that is for example an NF Tre that we minted in Paraguay where we also have a conservation project but we really cannot measure everything because like if you look at the sides for example this is for example if you never seen salad imagery they come in different kind of resolutions and flavors um but you cannot see a tree for example and we did a scientific study where we measured every single tree on the ground in Ecuador on six sides then compared it with public satellite analysis and we found out T these satellite images are wrong and even worse listen to this now this is also a forest notice how there is no sign of life no birds no tranquility and this Forest is actually next to the forest you just hear initially and the reason this Forest has no life is because this is this Forest it's a monoculture where it's the trees were mostly planted just for the sake of storing carbon so that's H that's what's happening if you just have one metric and you optimize one metric you lose everything else of that big circle that I showed you initially we can't value what we can measure and currently we believe we're failing to capture Nature's contributions and that causes us a lot of problems introducing measure to earn so we believe the salite imagery are sufficient but not enough so they they're good but like we can go better and one of the ways we believe which it can go better is to actually integrate local communities into that process of releasing donations so we did several pilot studies in um the Philippines in surria in pangas and we educated local community members to take advantage to measure the things we couldn't measure before biodiversity uh the wealth of Life they went out in a field they uh collected the data on their smartphone they had uh they uploaded the data to our servers and of course uh thank you C we used valora uh to trigger out the donations and um Angelo who was here was our offramp that helped us offr straight uh without fat connect so yeah that was really a big success um here's some thank you C for for helping us do this and uh all the transactions are now transparently VIs ible and uh you can also see every single tree so impact and transparency something that can only the web free community do we tested this out and scaled it in Colombia in Kenya where our off- ramping Solutions worked as well where we also extended the data collection not just on measuring trees but flying like high resolution drone imagery um some fancy AI that can prove that if you have salite imagery and drone imagery there's some kind of a algorithm that can guarantee that these drone imageries are not faked from a location and yeah so measure to earn and we paid every single person who basically measured something the moment it triggers the contract a fixed amount of money so at at uh in the Philippines it was 66 cents per tree measurement and now we believe there's this new thing due to the increase of the need of label and understanding of data which we call label to earn which is how can we move from not just data collection but actually decentralizing data labeling and including indigenous slots and reward people for that indigenous knowledge so now instead of measuring the tree what about if you label ecological data and could you earn an income with that and we believe yes so and this is the last thing I'm going to show you I think this is super exciting because it's the frontier of science what we can do so biodiversity is super hard to measure and our team has competed together with Simplex DNA which is another wonderful re uh region company on the ex prise rainforce which is a 5year competition $10 million and the task of the express rainforest that happened last month was you have 100 hectares of forest in Singapore you're not allowed to enter that Forest but you have to measure within 24 hours as many species as possible and so what we did is we flew drones and we dropped like some uh DNA Samplers in it as you can see on the right and then also some water filtration and collected the DNA there but we also collected a lot of images and then what we did is we um we developed a technology that that's called social data labeling where we using guided large language models to capture inputs from local committee members here are free melee experts that are discussing our findings our data Collections and for example on the top they just detected a really rare freshwater species uh that was uh observation 212 and on the bottom they were discussing if this freshwater species actually does this mean that back then this was a rubber Plantation right all this information now we can use tooling to capture that to incorporate that and um label data with that was not possible before so it's much more context RT and uh in the end we scaled that campaign up so we had hundreds of participants around the world and for each label you submitted we paid out $1 and thank you Falcon for sponsoring that um label to earn is a way we believe which can scale because of the need for data for the AI Revolution that we're seeing right now so with the data for example we built something that we call data Commons so now the moment you label data and trees right these are for example the results that we were able to train using um the community labels for example what species that Tre is um just based on a drone imagery and this is just collected from the communities alone from the global s um through their work of measure to earn and label to earn and that has impacts not just on the global s but around the world this is a tree map from the Canton of surc Switzerland that we were able to implement and execute with the algor we trained within 24 hours and now the city of Sur is interested in paying um and if we can harness these resources these development algorithms and channel back the money into the communities we believe this is super big yeah so we we used the algorithm to detect for example some trees that city of Sur wasn't able to map um but our algorithm trained through Community data is able to do so and um last but not least I really want to show you how this looked like on the ground so this is a small video of the X prise competition that my team and I were participating in together with Simplex DNA and the team of e CC Switzerland and please take care of the the music this is the coolest thing ever honestly this is the coolest thing ever so um so when we used a DNA measurement often times when you measure the DNA you can't map it with any species we known yet and we don't know why this is maybe the DNA measurement was wrong or maybe the species doesn't exist um so in order to make the species more memorable for Humanity artist translates the DNA sequence into music and we have three different kind of um species that are the background sound of this video um and uh if you can listen hardly maybe you can you can guess what it is but it's a it's a snail it's a be and it's a it's a small end yeah so this the snail [Music] e xactly and so this is how we we use the technology on the ground and um yeah I'll end the talk here I want to say there's huge potential in thinking about outside the box with these new mechanisms finally we can add a frontier of what we can measure and if we can measure we can also value it and let's make sure that this is properly valued so we can preserve nature for everyone thank you so [Applause] much