The potential of web3 to accelerate the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals is a hot topic right now. Web3 tools and token ecosystems, when designed well and deployed professionally, can usher in new paradigms in finance, governance and innovation.
On Tuesday, January 17th, 2023 during World Economic Forum week in Davos, Switzerland, the Web3 tools for SDGs event, organized and hosted by ImpactScope, showcased companies building web3 tools to address 21st-century global challenges in education, carbon markets, poverty reduction and plastic recycling.
Tokenizing the energy transition
The first speaker of the day was Tobias Huber, Sustainability Officer at Siemens. Tobias gave an overview of several blockchain use cases focused on decentralised energy trading platforms and blockchain enabled energy management systems. Following his presentation Tobias took some questions from the audience about the opportunities Siemens sees at the intersection of blockchain and sustainability.
The future of carbon finance – #ReFi in the room
Next to speak was Anna Lerner Nesbitt, CEO of Climate Collective, the leading coalition of innovators using digital technology to unlock real-world, verifiable climate action at scale, and Chris Ebell, co-founder of Nomica, who spoke about methodologies to value and tokenize natural capital assets and ecosystem services.
Afterwards Chris and Anna were joined on stage by Gregory Landua, founder of Regen Network, Steve Zwick, Senior Manager of Media Relations at Verra, and Amir Sultan Malik Awan of Menthol Protocol, the decentralized sustainability ecosystem for automating climate-positive crypto. What followed was a lively panel discussion on the relationship and occasional friction between the legacy carbon finance industry and the new breed of web3 native ReFi pioneers. The conversation was engaging, educational and expertly guided by moderator John Ellison of ReFi DAO, who was the Master of Ceremonies for the whole Web3 tools for SDGs event.
From Plastic Recovery Guarantees to impact oracles
After a networking break, the presentations and panels continued but the focus shifted away from onchain carbon finance markets to other impact use cases, such as plastic recycling and altruistic stablecoin design.
André Vanyi-Robin, founder and CEO of Plastiks, gave a passionate talk about how NFTs can be used as a tool to monetize Plastic Removal Guarantees. Jasper Driessens spoke about Glo, the anti-poverty stablecoin and Kathrin Adam, CMO of CircularTree talked about a holistic approach to industrial decarbonization. Then it was time for the next panel, Offchain Impact and Onchain Value, moderated by Esther Val. Apart from André and Jasper, the panel also featured Charlie Moore (Chainlink), Rui Serapicos (WEF) and Lucia Gallardo (Emerge).
The future of education and a spotlight on homelessness
After another networking break the second last panel of the afternoon got underway. The moderator was ImpactScope’s own Chief Marketing Officer, Rafaella Orelli, who put questions to John Goodwin, former CEO of Lego Foundation, Jacksón Smith, CTO, Learning Economy Foundation, Michele Soavi, ImpactScope CSO, and Homelessness activist, Andrew Funk, who has been sleeping in a tent during World Economic Forum week each year since 2018 to draw attention to the roughly 150 million people, 2% of the global population, who are homeless.
From Ukraine to Kenya
The ImpactScope event ended with a discussion of sustainable web3 business models and perspectives from East Africa and Eastern Ukraine. The final panel of the day featured Pavel Hilman, CEO of Sensilize, a Ukrainian-Israeli SaaS digital farming platform for smart farming data collection and analytics. Other panellists included Kathrin Adam CMO, CircularTree and Alice Anangi, CEO & Co-Founder, Crypsense Digital Group, East Africa’s largest Learn-Play-Earn-Platform and Sean Murphy, co-founder of ImpactScope.
Fondue time at the end of an impactful day
No Davos day would be complete without a table full of Swiss melted cheese dip. After the conclusion of the successful event, ImpactScope and Plastiks, two of the hardest working teams in Web3, headed out for dinner.