Written By: Bryce Groark (Head of Strategy and Core Member of Moonjelly.io)Linwood Pendleton (Executive Director of the Ocean Knowledge Action Network)
Our planet and humanity are at a critical point in history. Ecosystems and resources are under epic pressure and constant threat. Many of our natural systems are collapsing. As deep sea diver Richard Pyle has noted, the world’s biodiversity library is burning.
Much of the innovation that helped us grow and thrive is now causing our decline. For more than 100 years (the Sierra Club was founded in 1892), conservation groups have been fighting tirelessly to preserve the planet, but even with thousands of organizations and countless individuals working in conservation and science, our planet’s ecosystem continues to suffer and decline — now at an exponential rate.
We can’t solve a decentralized crisis with a centralized solution.
Traditional, centralized approaches to conservation funding alone are not enough — centralised approaches involve too much politics and overhead; lack of collaboration, funding and incentives; lack of transparency and accountability; and insufficient direct connection between donors, scientists, and those on the ground working to protect and conserve nature. The centralisation of conservation funding results in too few ideas for the too many problems we face.
We need a new way of funding social good, including conservation.
We need a shift from a top down to a bottom up approach, one that acts as an alternative to centralized processes in which conservation funding is channeled only through a handful of big organizations and agencies. We need a new, more decentralized model for funding conservation — one where thousands or millions of potential funders can connect more directly with thousands or millions of conservation projects.
Why Decentralize Conservation?
Global conservation challenges, like climate and ocean change, are extremely heterogenous and vary across the globe. Finding the solutions to these problems requires an equally heterogenous (and trustworthy) collaboration between funders and communities — one that is both personal and still scaleable for global impact. Yet, current methods of funding conservation tend to be highly centralized with science funding moving slowly through government agencies. Conservation funding has traditionally been highly concentrated in the hands of a small number of large organizations.
We need a new conservation paradigm that incentivizes funders of all sizes, but especially individuals, to take ownership in direct conservation action. We also need a new paradigm that will allow these millions of potential funders to find the millions of people with important and actionable conservation ideas. If we could create a new way of decentralizing both funding and action, we could create a decentralized approach to conservation (Decentralized Conservation or DeCon) that would engage, inspire and drive innovation and solutions in the conservation space, exponentially through network effects.
Enter the Conservation DAO
The challenge that has held back previous attempts to decentralize conservation has been how to organize, connect, and govern the thousands if not millions of relationships that need to be made between conservation funders and those with project ideas and how to do this in a way that is transparent with an easy process for funders to verify the impact of their conservation investments.
Fortunately, a new type of human organization has emerged — the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) that could enable DeCon.
According to Coopahtroopa, “DAOs are internet communities with a shared cap table and bank account. Members work together to create, distribute and capture value relative to a shared mission. Ownership shares economic, social and political components, creating best practices for digital coordination.”
DAOs are enabled by and built on the blockchain. DAOs work by delegating decision making to individual teams, empowering them to take action on their own, and faster versus waiting for direction from a higher authority that can slow the process. Blockchain approaches then allow the DAO to encode these decisions, in a transparent way, that then governs the actions of the DAO.
DAOs pool investments and donations in a treasury, with the members deciding how that money is allocated. Through the use of smart contracts, DAOs can streamline and automate funding decisions and financial transactions by eliminating third parties and replacing them with decision criteria encoded in the blockchain. Funding decisions by DAOs can be made fully transparent by recording decisions in the blockchain. Smart contracts embody the rules, values and missions created by and representing the community. In order for any changes to be implemented within the DAO, the community must vote versus the decision coming down from a sole individual or group at the top.
“The DAO structure lends itself to being a value add for philanthropic organizations. Philanthropies, like DAOs, should be hyper-focused on being transparent and incorruptible, not just for tax related purposes, but because they know these are values that their donors hold as well. Alongside these similarities, blockchain technology brings value, security, and innovation to philanthropy, further enhancing the benefits of a DAO and a nonprofit.” (Zach Bronstein).
The DAO of DeCon
Of course, DAOs and DeCon will never be the cure-all for the environment’s illnesses. But broad adoption of a more decentralized approach to giving, investing, and connecting global conversation actors has incredible potential.
Conservation-focused DAOs are rapidly emerging — for instance Klima DAO (carbon credits) and Moonjelly DAO (ocean impact), but the planet and the people with the ideas to heal it need more DAOs. DAOs have the potential to disrupt, inspire, complement and compete with traditional conservation organizations. If existing and new conservation organisations look to the DAO model — or even partner with DAOs — it could help them rethink how they scale their impact, engage their global communities and show businesses and government the benefits of decentralizing conservation.
The Potential of DeCon
DeCon has the potential to generate more growth, diversification, communication lines, local control, and community empowerment for the conservation world.
DeCon is the digital evolution of conservation — more specifically, the digital transformation that could transform conservation by democratizing funding, connecting funders directly with stakeholders of all sizes, and verifying impact in conservation.
We envision a new form of DAO-enabled DeCon that could work alongside traditional, more centralized conservation, adding new layers of access, interoperability, and trust. We think DeCon has the potential to:
- Move energy into action via communities on the blockchain and reduce energy dissipated by larger, more cumbersome centralized entities.
- Build self-organising like-minded communities, connect stakeholders and experts across multiple industries, generate far greater reach, and operate autonomously.
- Better connect people to nature by making conservation more accessible, and easier for people to get involved and fund projects via the specific communities they are passionate about. It also will attract new individuals to get involved in conservation by creating automated crypto-based rewards for contributing to those specific communities and missions.
- Revolutionise the pace of conservation grant-making, even at small scales. Through the use of “smart contracts,” DAO-based DeCon could connect donors and investors to doers in ways that are orders of magnitude faster and more cost-effective.
- Unleash the financial involvement of a whole new community of donors and citizen conservation investors from the crypto community eager to get more involved with restoring the planet.
- Make resources available to those that currently have no easy access to funding, especially those in the global south and underserved communities. DAOs provide a new way of funding lesser known, but important projects in developing nations and could help funnel more funding, investments and expertise into those critical regions where conservation organizations are not as prevalent. Similarly, DeCon could help address climate and environmental justice concerns, and help conservation activists and even scientists living in those countries that are least responsible but most affected by climate and environmental change.
- Create a global portfolio of small scale ideas with global impact. Our earthʻs system is interconnected at every level. Conservation must be as well. Creating more connections and solutions globally to our biggest problems will exponentially scale and speed results.
Web3 is Coming to Conservation
With Web3 inevitable in our future, the digital transformation of music, entertainment, books, and communications is in hand. The same digital transformation of conservation is coming. Working together, we make the new world of DeCon one that is science-based, equitable, and transformative. Together we want to build conservation DAOs that will truly ignite and connect a global network of doers and donors working at every level to engage in our planetary crisis.
To make this vision a reality, we have embarked on the first science-based conservation DAO for the ocean — Moonjelly DAO. If you want to be part of the new solutions to the ocean, we invite you to join us or to explore the many other conservation DAOs that are beginning to emerge.
