Hello everyone!

Enjoy this video created during the 2021 Harvard Tech Review Fellowship of how new technology can be used to add social value and to fight against climate change. 

You will be given an introduction into the problem of the so-called “double counting issue”. Then you will hear from David Lais who will share his potential solution to the problem and two other experts will be talking about the positive impact as well as the feasibility of it. 

Experts:

David Lais (Germany) is a social entrepreneur and the founder of several innovative start-ups in the area of payments. He started his first company at the age of 16 and by pure chance entered the payments industry. He decided on the purpose of sustainable and socially impactful technology. In the ensuing months, he launched the non-for profit Organization for Sustainable Consumption, and co-founded ecolytiq, leveraging publicly available and payments data to enable sustainable banking.

David strongly believes in the urgency of consumer awareness and action on environmental impact, so as to reduce peoples’ environmental footprints in the long term. 

Andrea Armanni (Italy) is a social entrepreneur working with blockchain technology and data protection. He is eager to explore new technologies to solve large humanitarian problems. Mr Armanni is an ambassador at Fractal as well as Co-Founder of The List.

Pierre Champsavoir (France) is the managing director as well as principal consultant at COREUM. He is a founding member of Blockchain for Good.

Term explanations: 

Net Zero:

“Net zero refers to a state in which the greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere are balanced by removal out of the atmosphere. […]The Paris Agreement underlines the need for net zero, […].To ‘go net zero’ is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and/or to ensure that any ongoing emissions are balanced by removals.”

Blockchain: 

“A blockchain is essentially a digital ledger of transactions that is duplicated and distributed across the entire network of computer systems on the blockchain. Each block in the chain contains a number of transactions, and every time a new transaction occurs on the blockchain, a record of that transaction is added to every participant’s ledger.”

A chain can barely be broken to manipulate data without anyone knowing since each person involved can only change what he or she has access for. Blockchains therefore have so-called “proof-of-work”, making it an extremely secure technology. 

NFTs:

The so-called non-fungible tokens are a unique “digital asset” stored on a blockchain that can only have one owner. They are similarly encoded like cryptocurrencies, enabling the owner to have 100% proof of ownership.

An example of a field where NFTs are in use at the moment include the digital art business. While the work of art can be available to the general public on online platforms, the original item belongs to the NFT owner. 

Cryptocurrencies are “fungible”. One item has the same value as another of the same kind and they can be equally exchanged. NFTs are “non-fungible”, meaning that they cannot be equally exchanged as each token has a unique digital signature. 

This allows artists to sell their art, music, videos etc. to sell their art without a third party in play. 

Smart Contracts: 

“A smart contract is a self-executing contract with the terms of the agreement between buyer and seller being directly written into lines of code. The code and the agreements contained therein exist across a distributed, decentralized blockchain network. The code controls the execution, and transactions are trackable and irreversible.”