 I just, okay, that's fine, got it. Oh, sorry, I got it. Sorry when you said, so you're lying. Good to go. Welcome, everybody. Excited to kick off this meeting today, February 7th for the Climate Action and Accounting Special Interest Group. We have a special presentation today by Jen Stockhausen from Etherisk. He's the Chief Legal Architect. They're excited about this presentation. Before that, I want to kind of go through a couple housekeeping action items and then make kind of a big announcement. For anybody who's joining for the first time, Hyperledger follows the anti-test policy. So at the very bottom of this meeting page, you can find information about that as well as a Hyperledger Code of Conduct. I want to take an opportunity, if anybody is joining for the first time, to invite you to introduce yourself. We'd love to hear a little bit about your interest in the SIG and how you found out about us. Is there anybody on the call today? If there is, for the first time, if there is just feel free to speak, raise your hand. Okay, we are all, we're all old-timers here. Great. Okay. Well, Dr. James, I'm glad you could join us. So very quickly for just a reminder of everybody, there are technical, and this is an open source community. We have technical and non-technical opportunities for contribution. We have them listed on the site. If you're more interested in joining some of the technical work related to some of the climate accounting solutions we're building around emissions tracking, I highly recommend you join the programming calls that happen. I think it's every Monday, I don't know, you can find it over here underneath the meeting. I'm looking at that under the peer programming calls. Very strong development community there and really interesting solutions being developed. We also have some really interesting research projects underway. So I invite you to explore that as well through the research working group and also sign up to the group's mailing list. Thank you to take part in the discussion and it had updates about different speaking up, speakers that are sharing the state of the art, what's happening in distributed technology and climate. If there are any announcements for anybody's working groups or any activities related to the SIG, please feel free to share. I will say that I've been helping support some of the work that Bertrand Rue has been doing with Tai Chen and some other members around that emissions profile solution for tracking emissions data through supply chains to the product level. As most of you know, we launched a prototype last year, got several different awards. We are in the process of trying to find some corporate partners to pilot some solutions with it. And I've been working with Jeff a little bit about targeting some of the different industries that are going to be affected by the carbon border adjustment mechanism in Europe and try to find some corporate partners. So really excited about that. Are there any other announcements for any of the other groups? Feel free to kind of share really quickly. Okay, so the other announcement that I wanted to make, and again, I'm really excited to announce it. Kamlesh Nagwade is joining as vice chair for the Climate Action Accounting Special Interest Group. Robin has stepped down as the co-chair due to a lot of the work he has with Kubo, the startup that he's launching. So Kamlesh, I'll give a little bit of opportunity to kind of share a bit about his background, but he's a CTO of Snapper Future Tech. Most everybody on this call who's involved with Hyperledger knows who Kamlesh is. He's been involved for the same since the beginning. He's been a member of the Technical Steering Committee with Hyperledger. He kind of helps lead the Hyperledger India chapter and is a very strong influence in just the blockchain ecosystem. India as a whole, he brings to a lot of experience from kind of just a technical understanding but also understanding the ecosystem and use cases and what's being done. So we're having some really interesting conversations about the future of the SIG and kind of potentially expanding the focus, the scope to include all of the different activities that have been having in the climate space. And I think that Kamlesh is going to be really valuable in helping provide guidance there in direction. Kamlesh, did you have anything you wanted to share before we kicked off and do Steve Theresek? Yeah, sure. So I think thank you first opportunity because I involved in the SIG from last three, four years when it started and even active contributed to this Karman Accounting Working Group. So I know the end to end how it is built architecture to the invent mentorship to the couple of men to do the program. And actually in India, I'm come under the top 30 blockchain influencers. So in every event in India, I'm one of the speaker and talking about the hyper-illegal ecosystem and what we are doing. So I think what I see in the SIG, I think there are more because currently we are focused around the carbon accounting and standard and other thing but I think climate is more than this carbon accounting because there are lots of like regenerative finance sustainable finance. And I think multiple efforts happening globally. And even I have up to the data with about a 350 plus projects is working towards the climate change and climate action. So, and most of this using hyper-illegal. So maybe in the, this new role, I would like to get involved all these people who are working on the climate in hyper-illegal and just beyond the crypto, just beyond the carbon accounting, but other new, even like in my organization, we are, I'm also working on two projects. So one is this recycle recycling industry. So this plastic recycle, battery recycling. So we have done some product in some pilot with customer. And another kind of solution where the sustainable finance and green financing thing. So we are going to be sent boxing in one international finance body in India for kind of piloting the sustainable green finance generated using the hyper-illegal public technology. So I think there's lots of things innovative happening in India and other places. And due to my presence as an influencer community, lots of people approach me. Even I mentored a couple of blockchain startup in India, which is part of ministry of IT and government of India and also premier engineering colleges like IITs. And I currently I'm entering two startups in the same category where they are building some kind of climate change initiative project using the blockchain technology. So I think all this kind of my network and connects I try to bring here. So in the maybe next year, who could be got a stronger community going forward. Thank you. Great. And sounds like David is, David, are you still on the call? All right, because I need to help. Okay. So thanks, Kamlesh. I go ahead and introduce Jan now. So yeah, I met Jan at the, at COP 27, was really excited to hear about some of the different opportunities for using distributed technology to introduce insurance solutions to try to help tackle the climate challenge, some of the challenges that are being created by climate change. And so, yeah, let me go ahead and give, let me stop sharing. And then I'm gonna go ahead and allow one moment. Sorry, David, David hopped off and I'm trying to figure out how to allow Jan to share his screen. David, are you no longer there? Great, okay, perfect. I think it's already working. Yep, yep. There we go. Perfect. So, yeah, okay, sorry, didn't mean to interrupt you. No, please. Yeah, that was, I'd love to just kind of kick into it because we've used up a lot of time, I'm making some introductions, so let's hop into it. No worries. Yeah, so thanks for inviting me Sherwood and David. Really glad to have an opportunity today to speak a little bit about some of the details of our work and how it relates to climate action. As Sherwood said, I'm Jan Stockhaven, the chief legal architect of Ether Risk. We met indeed at COP 27 and yeah, it was an exciting environment to discuss how technology can play its part in the challenges that climate change presents us with. So, yeah, I'm looking forward today to share a little bit of information about what we do and how decentralized insurance comes into fighting climate change. So, yeah, maybe I'll start with a little bit of an introduction about Ether Risk. I'll then explain three different ways and how our work has to do with climate action and go into some of the use cases. So, yeah, maybe about Ether Risk. So, Ether Risk has built a decentralized insurance platform based on the Ethereum blockchain, where multiple actors can come together to build fairer insurance products. The team is basically a team of senior developers, insurance specialists and economists, and of course also a lawyer by himself, with a few years of in-depth experience in blockchain and insurance. We're the first team to ever deliver an insurance solution on the blockchain with our flight delay product in 2017. We're also the first company worldwide that has implemented smart contract-driven weather index insurance solutions, which we're gonna see in much more detail today. We have a long-standing network of partners and working relationships in the InsureTech and blockchain and inclusive finance space. And our existing blockchain platform called GIF or the Generic Insurance Framework currently supports thousands of active policies alive and on-chain. Let me explain you a little bit about the Generic Insurance Framework. And the platform, like I said, is based on Ethereum and is completely open source and free for everyone to use. It's also deployed on other blockchains like Polygon, Avalanche, Binance, Smart Chain and Gnosis Chain and also since very recently, Selo. Essentially, it's a collection of smart contracts that implement basic functions of the lifecycle of insurance products. And it provides a toolkit for creating blockchain-based insurance solutions. Whereas similar process steps are available as modules, it can automate a variety of insurance products and a project that's currently hosted on the platform a flight delay insurance product. So you ensure your flight against the delay. Crop insurance, of course, which we're gonna look at very closely today. An external team is working on hurricane protection. So it's not by any means only climate risk insurance or agriculture insurance, but all kinds. The GIF also, it's important to understand the GIF connects an entire ecosystem of services providers in the insure tech value chain. So there's data services, so basically satellite, whether data, for example, or payment networks, the product designers who design the insurance products from an actuarial point of view, distribution partners, funders, investors, et cetera. All these come together on the platform and essentially in very simple terms, it does two things. It automates insurance products and also it offers the possibility to organize risk pools with collateral directly on the platform on chain. So this is pretty new. Maybe quickly to set a little bit to sort of the background of how our work and decentralized insurance comes into climate action and basically it relates in our work relates to climate change in several ways. Agriculture insurance, like I said, we are quite known for agriculture insurance. This provides a tool for adaptation to the effects of climate change and helps building resilience of smallholder farmers and other low income vulnerable communities in emerging markets, especially. It connects or we could also work on connecting farmers to the carbon markets. So this can produce additional income for the smallholder farmers. It provides an effective carbon removal tool through agriculture and an insurance can be included in these solutions. Also we are working on products to ensure carbon offsets themselves against the risk of reversal. And this obviously has the potential to increase the confidence of investors in the carbon markets and stabilizing the carbon markets to a certain extent. So let's start with agriculture insurance. Maybe sort of a quick reference. So easy risk is most visible in the agriculture insurance space at the moment. We're focusing on use cases that utilize blockchain technology to automate agricultural so-called weather index insurance products to protect for smallholder farmers in emerging economies from the devastating effects of climate change. So these are parametric insurance solutions. It has to be said. So essentially they don't work with claims assessors who go and verify whether or not an actual damage has occurred but it basically uses statistical models to basically run crop growth models and historical data against each other. And then it compares it to actual weather data measurements from stations or weather satellites to then statistically determine whether or not a damage probably has been occurred. So it works purely parametrically. The advantages it's much faster and much cheaper and increasingly accurate with modern technology. So smallholder farmers, what is that? Here we see these two football fields that's normally the size of the smallholder farmers field and here we have an illustration of how many for example smallholder farmers are insured in Sub-Saharan Africa, only 3%. So that's a problem. Overall, in developing countries an estimated, we have an estimated 270 million smallholder farmers that are uninsured. And they're also unfortunately very often the communities that are most vulnerable to climate change and with sort of the effects of climate change starting to show it's, they are increasingly threatened by these weather conditions and this is essentially also a problem for global food security because about, well just under 50% of globally consumed calories are produced by smallholder farmers. So of course the solution to this problem, it seems simple. It should be insurance to increase the farmer's resilience against adverse climate. And we would basically just need to try and ensure these guys so that if they lose a season or a season's crop, they will be able to rely on the insurance payment and continue sending the children to school. But unfortunately the uptake of insurance in emerging markets lags behind due to mainly three reasons, affordability. Insurance solutions are simply too expensive for most farmers. There's also a problem with transparency. Most farmers don't really trust insurance companies that is related to the third problem which is very slow payout. So farmers have reported to us when we were in the field in Kenya, they've reported that they've waited up to three or six months, sometimes a year or two years for the insurance payment. And this is absolutely not acceptable. Farmers cannot wait that long. They are subsistence farmers. They live off the crop that they cultivate. So they absolutely need an insurance payment much faster than that. So the solution that we are bringing is an innovative insurance product that is completely automated on the basis of insurance smart contracts on the blockchain to provide a much more efficient and much faster and also cheaper weather index insurance solution. So this obviously covers a whole number of SDGs but let's go and have a look at the solution. So like I said, very few insurance companies at the moment managed to cover those three bases, cheap, fast and transparent insurance. And that's why farmers haven't really taken up the solutions that are on the market so far. So let's look at a little bit maybe at our first parametric weather index insurance solution that we've built on the blockchain together with a Kenyan insurance services provider called Acre Africa. They're one of the larger ones in Sub-Saharan Africa. They're active in a number of countries and backed by a large seed producer called Sinjenta and also Zeppri, an African insurance company and building on a first pilot that we actually had with Oxpan and Aon in Sri Lanka. We have been working since 2000 and 21 on a larger scale use case in Kenya which with the support from Chainlink, Ethereum Foundation, MercyCorps and Swiss Development Corporation. Yeah, so basically what we've done is we've chosen one of their sort of existing products in the market. So it was called a Beamer Pima and we've digitized that end to end to become a fully automated product that is basically expressed as a set of smart contracts on our blockchain. Sorry. Just back, back, back. Done yet. And so the product is distributed in cooperation with farm input suppliers. So when the farmer buys supplies of seeds at the beginning of the season, each bag of seeds would have one of those scratch cards that you see here at the bottom center in the picture and they would find the scratch card and if you uncover that gray field, you find the number and that number we see here on the next, when the farmer then plants the seed, he can uncover this secret number and send it through the USSD function, essentially an SMS from his feature phone. So he doesn't need a smartphone directly into our system and that provides the necessary personal and agricultural information from that text message. Essentially we, from the number that he texts us, we know which crop he's planting because we know where the card was placed. We know his location, we triangulate his location and we know that the, we know his phone number and we know that the initial premium was prepaid by the seed producer. So the farmer can then, during the season up to a certain point, make top-up payments to increase his cover. All payments are channeled through the East African M-Pesa MOBA payment system. And so under the hood, the insurance smart contract will sort of, once we receive the data by USSD, from the farmer, the insurance contract is active and will start autonomously to track weather data relevant to the farmer's policy in the farmer's location. Such data is sourced from satellite weather data providers and it can also come from connected weather stations in the relevant regions, which are then acting as the oracles for the smart contract. And all this happens in real time. The smart contract can automatically execute the payout through an API, connecting the MOBA payment network as soon as the agreed trigger for drought or flood damage. So the farmer's policy obviously will define sort of the condition of a level of rain or absence thereof will mean a flood or drought. And then it can autonomously basically trigger the payment through the MOBA payment channels. And by triangulation, we can see here also on our back end the exact position of the farmer at the time of the call and locate them and see sort of how many policies have been sold. So maybe a few sort of comments about how this is set up from an operational or operational point of view. We see here a very typical chart actually of how this is normally set up on our platform and I'll just walk you through it very quickly. So I'm not sure if you see my cursor and so in the top left corner we see Aka Africa they're the ones who have developed the insurance products as such they've done the actuarial work. They do the project management and they have very importantly the customer relations through a network of village champions that are sort of on the ground and have direct contact with the farmers. They also do the back office work of policy maintenance, et cetera. We as Etherisk we do, we provide the technological platform and maintain it and we've also designed and manage the user interface. Then we have moving to the top right corner arc to weather data satellite that is where we get the meteorological data from that goes into the smart contracts and then bottom right, we see M-Pesa which is the mobile processing a payment processing network and then you have the distribution which is through these farm input suppliers and then we re-reach these farmers. So this setup is pretty much transferable in other cases as well. Sort of results of this solution has huge potential. The premium reductions that we've achieved after the first season were up to 30% and we were able to reduce the claim cycles of sort of when the farmer receives the payment from three to six months to less than a week. 40% of the payments were actually made in the first 24 hours. So and this is very importantly, this is after the farmer has had too much or too little rain and not while the traditional insurance solution would wait until the season is over and then you'd have to wait three to six months. So it's really a huge difference and farmers were really pleased with that because these payments solve an existential problem for the farmer which is cash flow and like I explained these delays make a huge difference. If he gets the money fast that really helps him when he needs this money. Yeah, so I think also a transaction cost was reduced by 80% and the customer experience 58% of the farmers reported and improved onboarding and communication and access to information experience because we had also given them an SMS function where they can basically request the policy status at any given time. So we're very pleased with these solutions and farmers actually use this SMS tool, I think 80% of the farmers use it once a week. So it's been a success so far and based on the success we've also been invited I remember we were continuing to work with Acre and I think we're now in the fourth season and so we're adding new data sources, we're adding additional products and also I'm now just sort of off the printing press Salo has provided some support for us to start building on-chain risk pools. So that cooperation is going very well. We've also been invited by the Lemonade Foundation, it's a US insure tech which you might have heard about and who have launched a crypto climate coalition last year. And they were also working also in Kenya with another insurance service provider called Tula and where we are sort of working on insurance solutions completely on web three technology with also a sort of a vision for a global approach to blockchain solutions in insurance. And yeah, also perhaps in November we were accepted into World Food Programs Innovation Accelerator and we started to work on the live project with them for Burkina Faso in January. So that's I guess concludes the part of insurance as a tool for climate adaptation and next out of this work we've also been ended up in conversations about connecting farmers to carbon markets. So I think this is quite interesting to share as well. And I'm gonna sort of mention a few of these conversations we're having at fairly advanced stages, some of them. So maybe as a pretext, I said our technology can reduce operational costs by 80% which is only a part of the overall premium. So it's like I said, it results in 30% lower premiums which is good, but it's still quite an expensive insurance is quite expensive for farmers. So we believe to really drive a paradigm change and we really must find other sources of other revenue streams to subsidize the premiums for the farmers. Of course, you can look to government subsidy schemes of which there are many and it's quite common sight but also the government subsidies are not really sustainable. So we believe that the real game changer will be to connect farmers to the carbon markets. So that would allow farmers to generate additional income through carbon farming strategies such as AWD irrigation, so alternate wetting and drying, decarbonized fertilizers, special seeds that lock more carbon in the plant or in the soil, agroforestry strategies, biochar farming there's a myriad of measures that the farmer could adopt. And this would allow them then to generate income in exchange for the carbon credits that they generated. And that would leave insurers in a much easier position where they're currently trying to sell large numbers of small ticket insurance to farmers who still find it quite expensive. And that would change to basically onboarding farmers into programs where the farmer can actually make some money that the insurance would be included. So this is, I see this as a win-win for everyone. So this would generate or would activate farmers to help generate carbon offsets and neutralize emissions. It would bring an element of mass adoption to the carbon markets. It would achieve a sort of a direct asset transfer from the global north to the global south. For in exchange for those generated carbon offsets farmers would become more resilient not only through the income but also through the insurance that could be included in such programs. So that obviously then would improve food security and then also sort of help with counteract land degradation. So there's only positive benefits as far as I can see. And we are working on a couple of fronts to support initiatives who are trying that with our platform. And of course sort of insurance is always sort of the pivotal aspect why we're there. So let me tell you maybe about a conversation which we're having with UNDP in Ghana and there was the moment drafting an MOU with them. So basically there they have a program where they piloted this in the Philippines and they're basically trying to encourage rice farmers in Ghana to adopt an irrigation strategy called AWS or SWD called alternate wetting and drying and which basically means you don't flood the rice field for weeks on end but only at very specific times that reduces the methane emissions from the field. And that's obviously a greenhouse gas and for those reductions you can apply for to verify and certify carbon credits which UNDP does sort of together with a certifier in this program and then these carbon credits are sold to the Swiss government and the farmer gets a certain amount of money for the carbon credits that were generated through him changing his irrigation strategies. So that's quite an interesting one and we were basically asked to provide an insurance because the farmers were reluctant to onboard it to the program because they understandably said, well, we have a certain traditional way of farming rice and it's worked for us and now you ask us to change this so what if I don't have the same amount of rice at the end of the season? So they needed a basically area yield insurance which basically covers the farmer and says, okay, you don't need to worry about having less rice at the end of the season because if you do you're gonna get an insurance payment and that's where we came in to basically provide this on the platform and at the same time, we were also asked to provide to provide the whole tracing of the program requirements to be eligible for the payment from the carbon credits and we were also sort of offering to or we are offering to this on our platform which the platform is perfectly capable to do and yeah, so it's of course, it's with these larger NGOs it's always a long process. Another thing that I'd like to comment on we are also exploring possibilities. I've mentioned the distribution approach that we have in Kenya with Acre Africa and we're basically bundling the distribution of the insurance product with the seeds and of course, you could also bundle it with certain products like decarbonized fertilizers or special seeds locking carbon in the soil or so there you could also then create a program where the farmer generates carbon credits and that can subsidize its insurance. We've also submitted a funding application to the insure resilience solution funds with the consortium of actors in order to insure coffee farmers who are practicing agroforestry farming in Uganda so there's a lot of these programs out there and we're trying to sort of help them find a platform to process all this and also link this in with an insurance also of course our partner Acre Africa is also looking into strategies to activate the farmers for carbon farming so this conversation going on about biochar and also ensuring basically forests and reforestation projects and that's actually where we've come where we've come about a very interesting new type of insurance or a new type of risk that is evolving in the carbon markets and that's the third element where our insurance comes or sort of has a touching point with the carbon markets because carbon offsets need to be permanent to have any sort of actual benefit the carbon needs to be taken out of the atmosphere and locked in the soil or it needs to be somewhat permanently stored and here the question is if you have for example a reforestation project and that absorbed a lot of carbon and that's now locked away in the trees and in the soil what if that forest burns down so this brings me and the carbon is back in the air and that brings me to the next subject which is ensuring carbon offsets so with Coorist and floodlight and chain link we've identified that problem and we basically worked on a proof of concept together with them in order to see if we can find a solution to this sort of problem of basically reversal and so basically carbon credits that sort of if the forest burns down the carbon credits become invalidated and you in theory would have to reverse them so that's the problem so what happened or what did we do here and so Coorist is essentially a company that means carbon offsets completely based on web3 technology end to end and even the sort of the whole verification and certification process is tech driven and floodlight basically provides the satellite sensing technology to basically accompany the process of minting their CO2 tokens basically carbon offsets under their own standard and they issue them as carbon offset certificates to be purchased by investors or clients and for that they have their on-board farms or partly they have their own patches of land where they plant the trees and the on-board farmers that are basically planting trees on their land and each tree is very interesting I think each tree is basically represented as an NFT on the blockchain basically they call this very fittingly NF trees and if you you can purchase either the NF trees or the carbon offsets emanating from these NF trees so if you buy the NF tree then you the basically the carbon credits that come out of this tree on the ground will basically accrue to your wallet or you can just choose to buy carbon offsets those CCO2 tokens which they basically mint based on the data from floodlight which as we see here obviously the data from floodlight goes into the platform through Oracle services by Chainlink so we've created together with them a simple insurance product as proof of concept against natural disasters it covers wildfire most illustratively but also flood and storms and under the hood the product is essentially a two-tier product as we can see here on the left side there is there are two elements this one element is the repayment of the planting costs of the tree which happens in actual let's say in cash or in this case USDC the other part is the the payment in actual C02 tokens for to replace the C02 tokens that were lost when a tree burns down or is destroyed and so basically the C02 tokens would be replaced tit for tat from a risk pool which is filled with those very C02 tokens which is an interesting way of dealing with it because the investor has the benefit that whoever bought these C02 tokens they have peace of mind that no matter what happens to the actual physical forest they are carbon neutral because of this insurance product so I think this is I think an interesting new type of insurance product which I believe will become a standard in the insurance sorry in the carbon markets because the current system as it is has not really solved this problem of what happens to reversal at the moment the way this is handled in the carbon markets is that about I think 10 or 15% of the credits depending on the situation have to be kept in a reserve and that's obviously a very inefficient use of the capital so basically the certifiers require that and then that's very inefficient and this could be better so insurance mitigates this and of course just because a tree is insured doesn't mean that the carbon that is released when tree burns down is somehow back in the soil it's still in the atmosphere but the solution helps to stabilize the carbon markets as it eliminates this very important risk to the permanence of the purchased carbon offices for the investor so the investor knows I bought an insured carbon credit and I am carbon neutral and I don't need to worry about what happens to the physical project so this is I think a Bloomberg very recently estimated the carbon markets will increase to a value of 1 trillion by 2037 so I think there's a significant business opportunity here also for this and of course it solves some of the problems or one of the main important problems of the traditional carbon markets and of course it's been come very obvious in the recent news reporting in the Guardian there was an article that basically questioned a lot of the validity of the carbon product of the carbon projects around the world and it's painfully obvious that there are problems in the carbon markets and these need to be remedied and I believe technology is going to play a really important role here especially blockchain technology and it's no coincidence and gold standard are both having public consultation or having public consultations last year about how blockchain technology can help with some of the problems in the carbon markets also the climate action data trust and the climate warehouse they're building already on where three technologies so I think in these times it's very important to realize that although the traditional carbon markets do have sort of problems designed into them like removal or permanence fraud or errors in the verification process and double spending there are those problems but it's really important to realize they are still the best instrument we currently have to channel financing into climate action so no one has an interest in the public losing their confidence in these markets but it's also clear something needs to be done and technology I think will play a really important part in this so at ease of risk we believe the carbon markets will entirely move to web 3 technology in probably the next I would say 3 to 5 years as my personal guess and insurance like I said will play a really important part and I think also from a web 3 perspective carbon markets could be the first sector where blockchain technology first breaks through to mainstream adoption as the dominant technology used in an established industry sector so I'd be very interested to see that and we happen to find ourselves at the forefront of these developments and yeah it's a pleasure to talk to you about this you can probably tell I'm quite emotional or quite enthusiastic about it but yeah we're always very interested to speak to partners and projects who are interested to have conversations how to leverage our platform and make the carbon markets better so I'd like to conclude with that thought for the time being and open the floor to some questions if we have enough time for that Hi, this is Jeff Robesky I just had something, I don't know if it's help me understand the carbon market just in general it's kind of a short question but you talk about digitizing let's say for example a tree and tokenized it becomes an NFT I'm making the I'm not sure if this is right so I'm just asking you this question as the tree continues to grow you're generating additional offsets that could eventually be or credits that could be traded is that what's occurring when somebody buys an NFT so then if the wind blows the tree down and it hits the ground the carbon is still sunken it and it's not releasing the carbon it may never if it gets buried with dirt it may never release it back what does insurance then pay for all the credits that it generated at one time or does it have some algorithm that says I don't know what rots over a certain amount of time releases it back to the atmosphere that's more of a carbon that's in the solution it's a very good question and I have the same question at some point so my best answer I can give to this with a disclaimer that I'm a lawyer and not a tech person so it's I also find it most illustrative to use the insurance of wildfire but we were able to cover these other risks as well flood and storm and you are right of course when the tree is sort of pushed over by a storm it doesn't release the carbon all at once like a tree that burns down but nevertheless it releases it within a short hour of years while the tree is rotting is my understanding and so I'm really also no expert in sort of decomposing chemistry of decomposing trees but my understanding is or I said to try myself that it doesn't happen instantly but it's also over a number of years a lot of the sort of compared to a tree if it had grown and had absorbed carbon there's a huge difference which needs to which needs to basically made up by the insurance is that where blockchain technology comes in as a solution then you could put that in a smart contract and it could monitor that and just pay out as it's whoever decides how that works is that where the blockchain comes in an advantage exactly the proof of concept that we've done is the insurance product is fairly simplified from so at the moment we're looking for an insurer who has sort of the proper sort of actuarial models to create this really into a full on live insurance product for now we've built the tech and we've proven that the tech works and this is very much focusing on the Web3 element what we are of course not doing we are the insurance platform so the poorest are the ones who are minting the NF trees and the CCO2 tokens so a lot of what happens on their end is something that I cannot really go into much detail about but yeah it's eventually you are right the insurance product would then sort of have to take into consideration sort of an estimation of how much carbon is actually lost and then pay out in that amount okay yeah thanks for all that appreciate it thanks very much for that presentation I have a counter argument to your supposition that insurance is a solution my argument is that assurance is a key problem because we've moved away from what carbon markets were supposed to be about which was originally a company or an organization would reduce their emissions and whatever emissions that they reduce they would then sell it the credit but not a company what would happen is that I'm sorry to say the financial community hijacked that system and went out and looked at forests fields and said well we could offset or create carbon credits from forests and fields and that was never the intention so there was no real work done in terms of continuous improvement and emissions reduction so what emerges that we have a system where the people are happy to pay and that is what actually caused the failure of Vera because they had no assurance that these so-called projects that they were working on actually generated the credits that they were selling but what you provide is risk mitigation in case of failure and I dare say it's a beautiful platform right? No disrespect to what they are doing but as climate change happens a lot of these projects will be at a risk because of forest fires because of just drought and other issues so it compounds the whole problem and we are not doing anything to reduce emissions so I am now of the view and I think a lot of practitioners of the view that in-setting should be the preferred course of action before off-setting that companies that reduce their emissions let countries that reduce their emissions before we think about investing in off-setting it's just a technical argument no disrespect for what you are doing it's a beautiful platform I'm very envious of your work but from a practitioner perspective this was never the intention for the carbon market it's drifted away from the original intent which was to get emissions reduction what we have is an explosion of financial engineering rather than environmental engineering I agree with that to a certain extent this is true the carbon markets of course there is this problem that the carbon markets have created let's say an arena where it is for some companies creating emissions it's just more convenient to just buy them and you are right that this is what the Guardian article was about that these red plus projects especially had partly overestimated the carbon or for example deforestation that they did avoid I believe this is true there is this problem in the carbon markets we should absolutely we are just the insurance element somewhere as a small part of the carbon markets but of course absolutely technology should be also driving development into how to reduce emissions and also how to sequester carbon from the atmosphere and how to basically take it remove it from the atmosphere and I think that's where I probably disagree it's still this sort of the convenience aspect someone who says I'll just do nothing about my emissions and just continue to emit and then I'll just buy carbon offsets and that problem is of course every market has this element of problem that people use this market for their own convenience and insurance will not change that in either direction probably but what you will be interested to know is that coolest for example the ones who we are working with they are hell bent on only certifying carbon offsets that come from basically nature-based removal project so essentially only if you actually take carbon out of the air rather than get created for not having created the same emissions you could have or not having sort of certain deforestation initiatives I agree that I see those credits critical and nature-based removal credits are I think higher and they trade at higher value in the carbon markets because I think a lot of people agree with you and have seen and identified these problems still I believe in order for these removal credits for example from actual reforestation projects where you basically plant a new forest and absorb the carbon to there's all kinds of risks some of them are insurable some are not and natural disasters that destroy the entire forest is a risk and if you want that part of the market to work I think insurance will be needed and I don't think it causes harm in the way that you explained but yeah that's the best I can do with that I think that's a good point Jen I think the reason that one of the key drivers of this community is just the interest in being able to avoid some of the the challenges and frustrations that Dr. James mentions in being able to provide accountability and transparency and granularity and a shared view into the climate actions that are happening mitigation actions both on the supply chain side the production side but also renewable energy credits and offsetting credits I think that we are all kind of firm believers in the value of this technology and being able to provide that visibility which we can use to kind of work for this kind of shared source of truth Kamlesh I see your hand raised yeah so actually currently I've seen a little bit from are we just only accepting the premium and client settlement on some kind of cryptocurrency there is no any fiat currency because mostly this could be the regulatory issues in other countries if you want to expand so any plans for that one it depends on which product we have some for example the project I was or the insurance product I was talking about in Kenya with ICA Africa I paid in fiat currency and we are in the case of the proof of concept that we've done with Kouris to ensure the carbon offset that at the moment is proof of concept and yeah there's a lot to be said for also paying in crypto currencies very much in the spirit with sort of the DeFi markets probably likely candidates are the stable coins but yeah there is of course certain uncertainties around regulation and we're obviously very careful to navigate these and we are of course always looking to be compliant with national markets where insurance where local actors offer insurance solutions and use our technology we are not normally the insurer so we stay clear of that for those regulatory issues okay okay okay thank you great well Jen we're over the hour I really appreciate you coming to share just the technology and also your approach I thought that walking us through the use cases and the partnerships is really helpful for us to also understand how you're pulling this together and how you are developing use cases for the insurance industry bringing together all the different technology providers is really illuminating and I just applaud you for the work that you're doing and really appreciate you coming and sharing with us today and yeah I just thanks everybody for the great questions and the great input yeah thanks thanks for having me really fun absolutely alright thank you everyone we'll see you in two weeks alright cheers bye bye