Dear Celo Community,
As we come to the end of the calendar year, we at the Climate Collective want to thank you for your partnership and support during our first full year as an active team. We’ve come a long way, starting with a one-stop-shop (Ed Walters) to an expanded team with a crisp mission, some substantial traction among the ReFi community (and beyond!) and strategic goal and objectives. Below are some highlights and achievements we are proud to share from this year, and a look into where we will be headed going forward.
I. Funding innovation: Grant progress to date
In Climate Collective’s first year of operation, we disbursed 31 grants totalling $3.7 million, both independently and co-funded with Celo Foundation. Some of our earliest grants have now launched their products and platforms, and are already demonstrating impact.
- Plastiks has recovered more than 1.2 million kilograms of plastic through its NFT marketplace.
- ReFi Spring hosted 27 community activation events across five continents. More than 2,200 people came together to join the ReFi community in locations such as Cameroon, Colombia, Silicon Valley, Peru, Uganda, Suriname, Berlin, and many more.
- Untangled Finance has developed a debt capital platform financing renewable energy across sub-Saharan Africa and the UK. This presents a viable alternative to Goldfinch or Centrifuge based on Celo.
In December, we announced our latest wave of grants: Gainforest, Awake, CRED Protocol, GEAP, Silvi, Avatree, Wildchain, Sanergy, Ardis, and Helios.
Beyond having a tangible contribution to ‘climate action at scale’, the grants program has positioned Climate Collective as a key enabling node within the nascent web3 x climate market and has helped attract notable projects to the Celo ecosystem, such as Gainforest, Thallo, Senken, SimplexDNA, and more.
In order to advance Climate Collective’s new strategic direction, going forward the grants program will be targeting best-in-class projects and teams that are building liquidity, data, and trust around digital environmental assets. Information on how to get involved and what specific themes will be prioritized will be shared in the new year.
II. Convening stakeholders: Membership growth and benefits
Climate Collective launched in October 2021 with ten founding members. Today, we have more than doubled to 21 members. Per design, our collective represent a diverse set of organizations from the web3 x climate space, including: tokenization infrastructure, marketplaces, liquidity providers, dMRV builders, community mobilizers, climate scientists, investors, nonprofits and more.
We are focused on building a community that is collaborative, engaging, and gives more than it takes. To achieve this, Climate Collective has a number of community initiatives designed to support alignment and growth of our members and the community:
- Learning calls - Once per month, we host a space for members to learn and connect with relevant initiatives and groups outside the collective, including: institutions like the World Economic Forum; builders like Neutral Protocol, Net Zero Co., Reneum, and ClimateTrade; and other ecosystem enablers like Gitcoin.
- Ecosystem events - In partnership, or independently, we show up at relevant industry (Web3) and sector (climate) events and host specific deepdives, networking or awareness raising gatherings. For example, on the sidelines of EthCC Paris, during NY Climate Week and most recently in Geneva.
- Coaching and advisory services - As an innovation network, we support our members with resources to excel within the web3 x climate space. This includes office hours for regulatory, technical, and scientific support, plus opportunities for leadership training and professional development resources for builders and their teams.
We’re thoughtfully growing the community in 2023, look out for new announcements in January.
IV. Partnerships: Supporting (cross-)sector collaboration
Climate change is a mass coordination problem. Through our partnerships and coalition building efforts, the Climate Collective has formed new working relationships with leading organizations from both the climate and web3 sectors. Together, we are navigating regulatory landscapes, mapping ecosystem resources to enhance sector visibility, and devising new pilot project opportunities to demonstrate real world use cases of blockchain based tools driving climate impact. Some of these initiatives include:
- [IETA] - The leading voice of the global business community on market solutions to the climate challenge.
- [Crypto Sustainability Coalition] - A World Economic Forum initiative to investigate how web3 and blockchain tools can be leveraged to achieve positive climate action.
- [Verra dMRV Working Group] - A multi-stakeholder group that explores key barriers and opportunities for using digital technology innovations in measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) for voluntary carbon markets and the VCS Program.
- [Gold Standard Digital Assets Working Group] - The working group on Digital Assets for Climate Impact leverages digital ledger technologies to avoid perverse incentives, double counting and claiming, and other integrity risks.
As we move towards a multi-chain world we’re doubling down on intra-and interoperability and are actively unlocking cross-chain projects that bridge Celo to Filecoin, Polygon, Ripple, and other L1s and L2s.
III. Setting our sights: Strategy and direction
At Climate Collective, we’ve spent the last two months refreshing our strategy, aligning with the growth of the ecosystem and emerging needs from our members. We’ve adopted a north star around ‘ruthless prioritization’ and integrated strategic partnerships across our 2023 goals to reflect the urgency for action coupled with the expansive challenge we’re up against - i.e. we can’t do it all, so we will focus on doing some things really really well. Our refreshed vision and mission are as follows:
Our vision is a world where regenerative systems are prioritized and financed that enable people and the planet to thrive.
Our mission is to unlock climate action at scale by building a trusted market for high-quality, digital environmental assets*.
*Digital environmental assets is a broader term for digitization of any asset related to climate and environment (for example: carbon, biodiversity, resilience, ocean health, air quality, etc)
To make progress towards this new aim, we are pursuing three long-term goals:
- High quality DEAs are available, trusted and easy to access
- Efficient and interoperable digital infrastructure, tools and standards are funded and prioritized
- Web3 for climate is recognized as a credible and high-impact sector
Looking ahead - a word of thanks!
As we close 2022 and look forward to 2023 as a team, we are thankful for the many interactions, collaborations and learnings we’ve had with the Celo Community this past year. To deepen the impact and reach of this community we are motivated to continue to be a bridge between Web2 and Web3 groups, finding innovative ways to crowd-in crypto-curious climate people and organizations and support piloting and sandboxing of Celo-powered climate solutions and tools globally.
We wish you happy holidays and look forward to reconnecting in January.
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