The Commonwealth Bank of Australia partnered with Biodiversity Solutions Australia to set up a biodiversity trading platform where companies seeking to offset their negative impact can purchase credits that contribute to individual landowners maintaining biodiversity on their land. These “bio-tokens” can be traded on a centralized platform and landowners, like farmers, can be assured that their “biodiversity” will be bought since, in Australia, all developers are required to pay for credits to offset their negative environmental impact. Prior to this, arrangements were decentralized and relatively complicated, so a blockchain trading platform provides a free, centralized way to create a connection between landowners and companies to streamline biodiversity preservation. This system is relatively new, and information on how biodiversity is measured is not entirely clear. It will be especially important to see specific details on how biodiversity is measured. Will the emphasis be on native biodiversity or just preserving as many individual types of species as possible, regardless of their importance to ecosystem health, services, or the local food web? Preserving biodiversity is complicated, and the complexity of preserving “biodiversity” is not easily distilled into a blockchain platform. One also has to ask if any good is being done since the goal is not building up, but rather keeping biodiversity the same, when biodiversity worldwide—and in Australia especially— is radically falling. Is now really the time to put biodiversity on the market and further exploit what is fleeting?
Categories
Biodiversity, Blockchain, Regulation
Air Pollution Robot
The dangers of air pollution to human health are well documented, though the traditional methodology of collecting and reporting on sample lags behind the need to keep abreast and regulate air pollution in a meaningful amount of time. The use of drones and robots have been identified by researchers as resources that can be tweaked […]
Artificial Life, Biodiversity, Climate Change, Ecological Monitoring, Industry/Natural Commodities, Lifestyle, Monitoring
Telematic Rivers
Erica Kermani’s artwork seeks to answer a central question: if rivers were seeing an equal, living entity, would humans take issues like climate change threatening them more seriously? In his year-long art exhibition in 2017, Kermani, in collaboration with Diana Salcedo & Jeana Chesnik, created a new forum of interaction between humans and rivers to […]
Climate Change, Ecological Monitoring, Lifestyle, Monitoring, Pollution, Visual Technologies
Co-occupied Boundaries
Art is easily found in nature but rarely is what considered art today inherently natural. The concept of co-occupied mediums that serve to be both functional for nature and aesthetically pleasing to people is being actively explored by Asya Ilgun and Phil Ayres, from the CITAstudio at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. In […]
Climate Change, Ecological Monitoring, Lifestyle, Monitoring, Pollution, Visual Technologies