The UK city of Bristol has taken the lead and decided to apply blockchain technology as a solution to climate change.
Bristol City Council is employing the technology to implement an initiative based on blockchain rewards. The city has partnered up with EnergiMine, which is a blockchain tech company. The council is hopeful that this will help in handling the town’s traces of carbon.
This initiative comes after the Intergovernmental Plan on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report on climate change last year. The report highlighted that the impact of a global rise of 2C in temperature will have devastating effects. The respective government bodies were then asked to take the required action such that the maximum increase in temperature can be capped at 1.5C.
Following the IPCC report, Bristol City Council took the immediate steps and organized a “climate emergency” meeting in November last year, where it was voted (unanimously) in favour or becoming carbon neutral by the year 2030.
How Will This Work?
The city plans to use EnergiMine’s EnergiToken platform to provide users with token incentives. This way, the city’s City Council will use the token (ETK) to rewards employees who adopt energy-efficient behaviour.
Through encouraging and incentivizing behaviour change, the city hopes this will help in dealing with decreasing their carbon footprints.
Energy-efficient behaviour could include a range of activities like creating awareness about the environment, adopting carbon-neutral transportation, social cause initiatives, and so on. Once their actions are approved, employees will be provided with EnergiTokens in their own digital wallets.
They can then redeem these tokens to buy various products and services, or they can choose to donate the equivalent value to a registered charity.
Councillor Kye Dudd, Bristol City Council’s cabinet member for energy and transport, said:
“This behaviour change at a city-level will be key in the coming years as Bristol forges ahead on our journey to carbon neutrality.”
Bristol seems to be ready to “walk the walk” against climate change.
“The pilot to deliver rewards to our staff for being more energy efficient will undoubtedly reduce carbon emissions and save the council money on its energy bills, but we hope that some of those positive behaviours will overlap into people’s home lives and in time influence friends and relatives,” he said.
Bristol City Council joins Liverpool City Council in deploying blockchain for the climate change action. As reported by The Blockchain Land, Liverpool City Council announced last year a partnership with the Poseidon Foundation to become the world’s first climate-positive city by 2020.
Governments and blockchain
Undoubtedly, blockchain has found a range of uses cases so far. However, most of the governmental uses of blockchain has been focused on records management, smart contracts, voting, and so on. This is a great initiative, going beyond the expected and the standard, by a local council that was able to think differently and apply blockchain innovatively.
That being said, more and more governmental bodies are trying their best to use blockchain in their fight against climate change. Similar news came earlier this year wherein Yale OpenLab was provided with a grant of $150,000 to develop a blockchain-based tool to assist in climate change.
Bristol City Council’s initiative represents a much-needed step that local governments can take to start decreasing the effects of climate change. Slowly but surely, we are moving forward to saving the planet.