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The impacts of the climate crisis are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Yet, our approaches to monitoring and addressing this existential challenge often feel outdated and inadequate. The decades-old climate models we rely on have significant limitations, failing to provide the hyperlocal, real-time, and comprehensive data we need.
Limitations of Early Climate Models
Early climate models were constrained by the computing power of the time, unable to incorporate many critical physical processes or run at high spatial resolutions. The scientific understanding of key components like clouds, oceans, ice, and the carbon cycle was also incomplete. These models struggled with inaccurate predictions, lack of observational data for validation, and coarse spatial grids that couldn’t resolve regional details. While they still captured overall global warming trends, these limitations hindered their accuracy and reliability.
In addition, obtaining valuable information that affects our well-being daily, such as air quality, noise levels, and light pollution, remains challenging today, especially in the population-dense areas many of us live in today due to high infrastructure costs. However, emerging technologies like web3 and decentralized networks offer a new path forward—one built on transparency, community ownership, and aligned incentives to drive the creation of dedicated infrastructure, resulting in bottom-up climate solutions.
How Web3 Empowers Environmental Monitoring at Scale
The ethos of web3 is centered on decentralization, giving power back to individuals and communities. It’s about breaking free from relying solely on centralized approaches and enabling direct participation in systems that impact our lives.
For the climate fight, web3 offers a way to democratize environmental monitoring, creating a more transparent record and incentive structure for collecting critical data. It provides the tools for citizens to take climate action in their own communities.
This decentralized approach contrasts with current centralized models of environmental monitoring, where data collection and decision-making are often far removed from impacted communities. Web3 empowers local citizens to take ownership of environmental data, creating a tamper-proof, publicly accessible record of this data and enabling new incentive structures to encourage widespread participation.
Examples of Web3 Impact
Prime examples range from the effects of the 70,000 US wildfires that occur each year, as experienced firsthand living in the San Francisco Bay Area, to the toxic air we breathe across Europe, to the world’s worst polluted areas in Southeast Asia. A piecemeal approach won’t scale to cover the vast areas at risk, and today’s public is more aware than ever of the dangers we face. This is clearly where the distributed, citizen-led approach of projects powered by decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) can be transformative.
Benefits and Possibilities of Citizen-Powered Climate Action
The vision of web3-powered climate action is compelling, but what could it actually look like in practice? The potential benefits and possibilities are immense.
While air quality monitoring exists today, it often lacks the hyperlocal data needed to fully understand our environment. A widespread network of community-owned sensors could fill these gaps, providing unprecedented insight into the invisible threats around us and a greater understanding of how to tackle the harms from it. Much like how Google Maps revolutionized navigation, a web3-powered sensor network could transform our collective environmental awareness, making granular data on air pollution, noise levels, and light pollution accessible at everyone’s fingertips.
But the impact goes far beyond just awareness. This data transparency can inform better climate policy and create new accountability. Communities facing outsized environmental harms can use this information to advocate for their needs and push for stronger regulations and enforcement.
Web3 use cases like DePIN open up many other possibilities for directly incentivizing positive climate actions. People can earn tokens to generate high-quality environmental data or measurably reduce their carbon footprint. These rewards could be redeemed for eco-friendly products or used to fund local sustainability projects.
Reimagining Climate Monitoring for Meaningful Change
The limitations of current climate monitoring approaches have never been clearer. To meet the urgent challenge of the climate crisis, we need a paradigm shift in how we understand and respond to our changing planet.
But realizing this future will take all of us. It needs the collaboration of technologists and environmentalists, policymakers and everyday citizens. So consider this a call to action—an invitation to learn more, to find your place in this vital movement, and to help spread the word.
DePIN represents a powerful new toolkit for the climate fight. By empowering community members with data and agency, aligning incentives for action, and enabling granular understanding, it points to a future where we can mobilize a truly global response to this global threat.
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Luca Franchi is the co-founder and CEO of Ambient, the world’s largest decentralized environmental monitoring network. He brings over two decades of leading growth at several startups and large corporations in the US and Europe (O2 UK, Telefónica, Sky) across enterprise and consumer verticals.
