Davos 2023: Earn A Living By Protecting Forests, Rather Than Cutting Them Down

The World Economic Forum, which is often referred to as WEF, is a Swiss-based international organization focused on engaging leaders in finance and government, among other areas, on tough issues to shape policy and improve the state of the world.

The 2023 annual meeting of the WEF in Davos, Switzerland, happened last week and was concerned with post-COVID-19 pandemic fragmentation and multipolarity. In attendance were the likes of actor, producer, director and musician Idris Elba, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and First Lady of Ukraine Olena Zelenska, among many others.

Benzinga attended this year’s annual meeting to interview leaders in business and government. The following interview is with Alan Ransil, project lead at Filecoin Green.

Please note that the below text was lightly edited for clarity and concision.

BZ: Care to start off with an introduction?

Ransil: My passion is climate change. In school, I focused on materials engineering because I wanted to build technologies that would help solve climate change. Specifically, I did research on solar cells and, when I was in graduate school at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology], batteries.

How was your experience at MIT?

It was really neat. I did a lot of work with the MIT Energy Initiative and started a company that worked on putting phase change materials into walls. This allowed buildings to better control their temperature and reduce heating and cooling bills. That evolved into a lot of modeling of how these buildings interact with power grids.

These experiences eventually led to the work you did at Protocol Labs, right?

Yes. One of the first things I did at Protocol Labs, the company that started IPFS and Filecoin, among other projects, was research work. I was looking at decentralizing the power grid. After the network launched, many asked questions about energy, given that the network uses about 7.5% of the storage capacity at Amazon.com, Inc.-owned Amazon Web Services.

I was sort of the best person in the company to work on answering that question.

What did your research look like?

In understanding the network better, we created a dashboard at filecoin.energy. Through this dashboard, we see the location of storage providers, their energy usage, as well as how much capacity they are contributing. When you contribute, you have to cryptographically prove you are contributing to the storage capacity and storing files over time. Using these proofs, we are able to identify your hardware and project the energy uses of your node.

Do you show whether renewable energy is in use?

Yes, using the dashboard we can see whether renewable energy is in use, and we’re able to download the actual certificates to see where that renewable energy was produced. With our information, we can also connect nodes to renewable energy.

What’s the big takeaway of this endeavor and what is the follow-on impact?

We should be applying Web3’s transparency and public verifiability values to sustainability.

Another component to mention is environmental reporting and the way it is done. If you have a supply chain, every individual company involved in that supply chain will report changes made in their processes. It can take years to understand the impact of changes. We want to provide people with more accurate and timely data on the emissions associated with those changes.

What’s your day-to-day focus?

Two things. How can we measure and reduce the environmental impacts of Filecoin itself? And, where can we use decentralized data in order to help other people do the same?

One of the things we work on a lot is trying to sustain and grow the regenerative finance or ReFi community. There is a deficit of trust in carbon offsets and in sustainability reporting, and one of the reasons why is that the data itself is frequently not public or publicly verifiable.

We want to understand the details companies are reporting. Are they actually net-neutral? Are they truly carbon neutral or negative? We need publicly verifiable data to understand what that means, as well as what did they do to get to that point. ReFi in Web3 solves this by enabling you to actually get that access to the ground data. We’re able to see if a corporate bought an offset from a particular batch of offsets from protected land.

How do you incentivize communities to not cut down forests to survive?

Measure-to-earn programs allow people on the ground to measure forests and natural systems around them using things like inexpensive drones or physically measuring the tree and plotting its GPS coordinates. The idea is to build up a public verifiable data set and use that as a way to show that we’re actually protecting these natural systems while providing people on the ground a way to earn a living by protecting the forest rather than cutting them down.

Tell me a little bit about your roadmap.

So the filecoin.energy dashboard uses on-chain proofs in order to assess what's the upper and lower bound, and estimate the energy use of each individual node, and the network as a whole.

The roadmap is to use public, verifiable, and decentralized data to show that estimate and what the actual power use is for a given storage provider, over a given period. What we're doing there is working with a third-party validator to assess whether that data is accurate, and establish an attestation on the actual energy use or environmental impact of that individual node.

The thought is to have this balance right between data privacy because an individual node is not actually going to want to make their power go public.

So, how do you define Filecoin Green's mission?

The mission of Filecoin Green is to measure and reduce the environmental impacts of Filecoin itself and build tools that are applicable to other systems. Our aim is to allow other chains to go through this validation process and have these Web3 attestations as to what their environmental impacts are, and use that for their own reporting.

What are some big concerns or challenges you’re faced with right now?

There are many different standards for representing carbon offsets and reporting for companies. Additionally, there are different requirements for different countries to report. There are different verification bodies for carbon offsets, each of which uses different models for storage. This is a challenge for anyone who wants faster and more automatic reporting. You need a better way to interoperate between all of these different standards.

We’re looking for ways to make it easier to tap into the community's collective knowledge about all of these standards and allow you to automatically assemble data transformation pipelines to interoperate between these different standards.

What do you see as a validation of the work you do?

Something that validates what we're doing is the Sustainable Blockchain Summit. The next one is going to be this April, in Boston, right after the MIT Energy Conference. It’s a forum for people to talk about how we can verifiably decarbonize different protocols and projects, as well as help other industries decarbonize in a way that’s more verifiable. The UNFCCC or United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was our supporter in this.

Going forward, where do you want things to go?

I want sustainability reporting to be publicly verifiable and automatic in a way that it is not now.

Is there something else you would like to mention or that we did not cover?

Zero-knowledge proofs allow you to prove properties of information without revealing underlying information. What’s going to be interesting is adapting that to prove emissions accounting was done completely and accurately without showing you the data a company used because that's very business sensitive.

Photo: Courtesy Filecoin Green