Saving the forest with carbon credits

ZHAW (Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften) organised the Innovation in Sustainable Finance and Commodities conference in Lugano. Opening the proceedings on Friday, 23 September, was Professor Eric Nowak, director of the USI Institute of Finance and the Center for Climate Finance and Sustainability, with a talk entitled "Tokenising Nature: Creating Digital Assets from Environmental Services." The topic is the effective protection of so-called "ecosystem services," the set of services and benefits that nature provides to humans. The climate crisis and mainly deforestation threaten these services, but ensuring protection is not easy.  In the region of Brazil known as the "arc of deforestation", there are 50 million hectares of private land: thinking about protecting them by buying them is unfortunately difficult due to restrictions in buying and selling, but it is possible to protect them through carbon credits. Basically, it is a matter of turning greenhouse gas emissions into a trading asset. Nowak proposes to do this through a cryptocurrency-based system, which is often accused of being harmful to the environment because of its high energy consumption. "With the successful "merge" of the second-largest ETHEREUM blockchain from proof of work  to proof of stake energy consumption and ecological issues will no longer be a problem for Crypto". Professor Nowak explained. Professor Nowak, could you tell us about your idea?