World Economic Forum Proposes Blockchain Solutions for Global Issues 🚨 This article is 6 years old...
World Economic Forum Proposes Blockchain Solutions for Global Issues
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Updated: Sep. 18, 2018 at 12:49 pm UTC
Photo by Arthur Edelman on Unsplash
As investigated by the World Economic Forum, the Blockchain ecosystem could be the digital kiss to a globally affecting environmental scrape.
A Blueprint for Biodiversity: PwC Presents “Building Block(chains)s For A Better Planet”
Combining efforts with the PwC, some unnerving terms were discussed in a report diagnosing the biggest environmental issues. “Artificial Intelligence” and the “Next Industrial Revolution” come to mind, for example, as developers navigate 65 potential strategies to remedy the harmful effects set into motion by an industrialized society. Arguably, our world just isn’t able to keep up with human activity.
As part of PwC’s Fourth Industrial Revolution for the Earth Series, “Building Block(chains)s For A Better Planet” provides a blueprint for biodiversity, highlighting how sustainability in a bio-economic society, in accordance with AI, may be the jumpstart necessary to regain control of economies, societies and governments in crisis.
The hypothesis further claims there are six major environmental challenges requiring immediate reform: climate change, natural disasters, biodiversity loss, ocean-health deterioration, air pollution and water scarcity.
In the first quarter of 2018, for example, it calculated 412 blockchain companies accumulated $3.3 billion in cryptocurrency funding, with a mere 1 percent of those earnings attributed to solutions for energy and utility issues.
According to Celine Herweijer, partner, PwC U.K., the primary utilization of blockchain technologies has gone into building businesses, thrusting finance and commerce into reform.
As fundamental cryptocurrency is from an economic standpoint, there is also an unused opportunity to develop ethical and transparent consumption and production incentives, including clean energy, water and mobility. Skeptics are challenged to question if the consequences are worth the risk, and whether or not the right stakeholders hold positions of power.
Dominic Waughray, head of the World Economic Forum’s Centre for Global Public Goods, is in favor of these points but adds change will not come overnight.
In a press release, Waughray said:
“They will require deliberate collaboration between diverse stakeholders ranging from technology industries through to environmental policy-makers, and will need to be underpinned by new platforms that can support these stakeholders to advance not just a technology application, but the systems shift that will enable it to truly take hold.”
Blockchain is an Opportunity for the Environment
Consider that blockchain is a geospatial platform. The world already relies on technology, and therefore electricity, to maintain societal needs. But if these consumable responsibilities are entrusted to the nacre of blockchain applications, sustainable resources and finances, and even information, can become a tangible ecosystem of the near-future.
Romanticism aside, renegotiating the wellness of earth requires stakeholders, and more importantly, unifying action. It doesn’t take an anthropologist to understand Earth is undergoing an environmental change. Nevertheless, the “Holocene equilibrium” reinforces the theory from a scientific perspective.
The blunt force trauma of the global warming debate is clear: 7 million people die annually as a result of air pollution, and increasing weather disasters cause at least $330 billion in damages.
At the very least, blockchain technology has the attention of big businesses, many of which have the power to influence or make legislation. As a gross domestic product of measurable market value, PwC estimates 10 percent global blockchain adoption by 2025.
The “Block(chain)s” report states on page 14:
“Looking further afield, expected advances in AI, distributed computing and quantum computing will likely support – and potentially accelerate – blockchain’s technological evolution. If it truly lives up to its promise, this new global computational architecture could rewire commerce and transform how society operates, becoming one of the most significant innovations since the creation of the internet. The opportunity to harness this innovation to help tackle environmental challenges is equally significant.”
Blockchain technology is an opportunity for the environment, and its reach beyond ledgers and entertainment into global security measures isn’t going unnoticed. One day, when the future is now, decentralized applications could sneak into necessary daily use, just like the internet once did.
