A proposal submitted by Trinidadian company Cropper Foundation is among winners from four countries in Latin America and the Caribbean of the Digital Tokens for Biodiversity Innovation Challenge launched by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and its innovation laboratory, IDB Lab.
The Washington-based financial institution announced on Wednesday that the proposal from Trinidad and Tobago’s Cropper Foundation is among winning proposals from Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru.
The IDB said the Cropper Foundation had submitted a proposal “to use digital tokens to incentivize agricultural sustainability and improve access to credit and capital for smallholder farmers in Trinidad and Tobago”.
The other three initiatives selected to qualify for financial support were Fundación Futuro (Ecuador), Terrasos (Colombia), and Nature Services (Peru).
Fundación Futuro submitted a proposal to “expand the scope of the zero-carbon system to offer monetary incentives to landowners for conservation and restoration, including communities favoring the transition to digital governance of DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations)”.
Terrasos’ proposal combined the concept of biodiversity credit with digital tokens to provide greater traceability and transparency to transactions by implementing distributed ledger technologies (DTL), which store information in multiple locations at any given time.
Nature Services had a proposal to structure socioeconomic incentives to recognize behaviors and actions in favor of biodiversity and avoid unwanted behaviors by integrating blockchain functionalities (including fungible and non-fungible tokens) and interactions between actors in a digital platform.
“The selected proposals will initiate the design of their projects to become eligible to receive IDB Lab financing and develop their innovative models in the four countries mentioned,” the IDB said. “They will also become part of the IDB Group’s network of global innovators to respond to the needs for the conservation of natural capital and biodiversity in our region.”
The IDB said the Digital Tokens for Biodiversity Innovation Challenge received 86 proposals submitted from 21 Latin America and Caribbean countries from startups, Small-Medium Enterprises (SMEs), non-profit organizations, corporations, think tanks, public innovation agencies, accelerators, and other organizations presenting ready-to-implement models.
The IDB said a panel of its specialists evaluated the capacity of the applicants, based on the degree of innovation, its social impact, scalability potential, financial sustainability, technical capacity of the organization, and the probability of execution of the proposals.
The initiative was launched “to identify innovative solutions that use these instruments to promote biodiversity conservation and facilitate action in the face of climate change”, the IDB said.
CMC/
