Myplanet.green, https://myplanet.green, is a tool that allows local communities to earn a living as stewards of nature. It’s a digital platform that creates partnerships by connecting donors and environmental stewards at opposite ends of a decentralized system.
Myplanet.green, https://myplanet.green, is a project developed in collaboration with Zippie https://www.zippie.com, and is supported by LCA.
Why we need Myplanet.green
Conservation and economic development are typically defined as competing interests, which present a critical flaw in the long-term sustainability of the current model. While indigenous people make up less than 5% of the total human population, they own or manage about 25% of the land surface, and support 80% of global biodiversity. By making conservation the financial vehicle to improve the livelihoods of indigenous people, through creating thousands of new conservation-related jobs, everyone benefits. Those benefits are also felt by society in the broader global sense, as the whole world profits from the protection of natural systems that support life on earth.
Myplanet.green’s process is simple. It enables individuals anywhere in the world to identify conservation projects that appeal to them. They can then use the secure Myplanet tool to make a direct money transfer to the people working on the project on the ground. The donor is able to monitor the results of the project as the work gets done, and payments are only released to project implementers once agreed milestones have been met. We aim to scale and accelerate the preservation of natural ecosystems by leveraging the power of the crowd, and, at the same time, help people improve their livelihoods. Myplanet.green can be applied to all cases where activities can be monitored (by direct methods, remote sensing, etc.) and broken down into milestones, turning them into countless new conservation-related jobs, potentially involving millions of people, both as donors and as implementers on the ground.
In terms of its potential to scale, Myplanet will consist of multiple independent nodes globally, each responsible for supervising and channeling funds to regional projects co-designed and implemented by individual community members. Initially, most of the nodes will be existing NGOs. These entities, in our experience, continuously need to increase their transparency and access new sources of funding. Over time, nodes can become an independent group of people, a local NGO or a branch of an international NGO. A stringent set of criteria governs the creation and operation of nodes. Anybody can propose and initiate a project, and anybody can form a node. The node will have a reputation score based on the success of the projects implemented under its supervision, creating better visibility of those projects within the community.
Monitoring approaches and effectiveness
Myplanet.green, unlike other systems, links payments (via smart contract in the blockchain) to the achievement of specific milestones, which need to be constantly monitored. The use of monitoring systems is a key aspect of Myplanet, and what makes it fundamentally different from any other existing system. Today, there is an ever-expanding toolset for measuring environmental variables. This makes it possible to quantify and monitor a boundless number of parameters, at different scales and in different timeframes. For many of these instruments, very user-friendly versions have been developed that make the monitoring of certain trends easy and immediate.
For monitoring purposes, we have decided to rely on specialised partners who are able to customise their tools to follow the evolution of Myplanet’s needs. The current partner, Sensing Clues, https://sensingclues.org, already has a suite of tools to collect, analyse and display a large volume of data and trends. It’s also possible to select new measurement systems for the variables, and integrate them into the system, whenever a new project requires different factors or the use of specific metrics. This makes it possible to continue creating customised monitoring systems that will inevitably increase the diversity of projects that can be implemented through Myplanet.
Each Myplanet project has to monitor two things:
The activities’ outputs:
• whether actions are being executed according to schedule and budget,
• whether the recipients of the funds are doing the work necessary to achieve the milestones, otherwise the funds are not released.
The projects’ outcomes:
• to determine intermediate and long-term impacts or changes in land use, vegetation cover, habitat quality, biodiversity values, etc. as well as people’s knowledge, attitudes and behaviours.
• Myplanet involves a system of permanent monitoring of the work done on the ground by individuals, which in itself confirms that the work needed to achieve an agreed milestone has been done, and a monitoring system that measures and shows the impacts achieved in the medium and long term.