Embracing Blockchain to Empower Consumers to Address Their Climate Impacts

By Jessica Verhagen | Published 6 years ago | About a 4 minute read

Imagine buying a pair of shoes and being able to address the carbon emissions from those shoes’ production and transportation right when you buy them. To date, this hasn’t been possible: We didn’t have blockchain to immutably and transparently track the carbon; point-of-sale integrations were cumbersome, and the carbon market has only worked in tonnes while a pair of shoes is around 12kg of carbon. Poseidon, however, is developing a solution — powered by Stellar’s blockchain and in partnership with Ecosphere+ — that breaks through these challenges and enables anyone to own their carbon footprint.

A typical journey for a customer in a retail outlet — and how a price on carbon can now be linked to consumer products through the Poseidon platform — is shown below.

Consumer preferences are changing, led by millennials, of which 70 percent are willing to spend more on brands supporting causes they care about. This, of course, isn’t just relevant to engaging customers, it is also important for attracting and retaining the best talent. But ease of use and hitting the right price point still matters for people when choosing brands or products.

Poseidon’s platform makes addressing your carbon footprint easy, at a miniscule cost. For one latte, the cost to rebalance the associated carbon is less than a penny. It doesn’t seem like much, but the collective impact if we all did this together would be significant. The table below shows the potential impacts of accounting for the carbon footprint of all the lattes bought in the UK over a year — over 68 million trees protected!

Financing the protection of forests is one of the best methods to tackle climate change. In fact, forests can help us get over a third of the emissions reductions needed to meet 2030 Paris Agreement commitments. To protect forests, Ecosphere+ addresses the causes of deforestation by working with local communities around the forests to pursue more sustainable jobs such as fair trade, organic cocoa farming — a transformative business model made possible by valuing the carbon stored in the trees.

We all know the problem: The earth is heating up and all the climate commitments made in Paris don’t add up to us living in a safe climate. Now, through Poseidon, we have a tool to help everyone be part of the solution and move beyond ‘doing less bad’ to having a positive impact on the environment and sharing the benefits with those on the ground through protecting the rainforest with every purchase.

The full Poseidon technology platform will be launched in June 2019, with a ramp-up of pilots and beta testing along the way. You’ll be able to participate soon, whether you’re a retailer wanting to account for the carbon footprint of your products or an individual wanting to opt in on your purchases. Read the white paper to learn more.