sustain credits

Planetary boundaries in highest risk of overshoot are plastics pollution, land use changes and biodiversity loss. Traditional extractive economics brought us to this perilous edge. We need an economic transformation to mobilize mass activity to restore Earth to a safe state.

Passionate individuals and organisations restoring nature are often undervalued, understaffed and underpaid. We aim to change that, by providing the scaffolding and equipment for mass participation in a restorative economy that rewards work in service to US Sustainable Development Goals.

There are market actors sourcing capital for nature restoration. However they lack the transformative imagination to scale to the level of need. 

Major credit registries (e.g., for carbon, and nascent plastics and biodiversity) are the traditional gatekeepers for measured and compensated nature action. However they’re generally inaccessible to average people, and it’s difficult and time-consuming to build and scale projects in these systems. An open-source, Wikipedia style of oversight hasn’t yet been applied to these credit markets, which use cumbersome and opaque processes.

Further, nobody in the market has zero-trust proof authentication systems needed to validate and verify conservation activities, when conducted by broadly distributed individuals instead of a limited number of on-the-ground partner organisations. This excludes most people from participating in eco-markets at a time when the Earth needs more participants. We are solving for this. 

We seek to be the next Facebook for nature or Uber for nature work. 

Imagine billions of people - anyone with or near a smartphone - each empowered not only to undertake small-scale efforts to solve the planet’s most intractable problems, but also to monetize those efforts, delivering distributed, marketable social gains for corporate donors seeking impact.

What we specifically do is reward participant volunteers of on-the-ground nature restoration projects, and attract capital to do so. 

We review volunteer proofs of work - i.e., plastics cleanup, tree planting, biodiversity conservation - and issue sustain credits tokens to earth doctors, on metrics informed by ecological science. The projects represent the “supply” side of our platform.

Our target customers (i.e., “demand”) are purchasers of sustainability and corporate responsibility services, and ESG and impact investors committing funds to nature restoration. 

Through sustain credits these business sponsors will have a platform to provide rewards to regular, on-the-ground people restoring nature around the world in accordance with UN SDGs, with faster delivery of outcomes and less middleman activity.

sustain credits receives 20% of sponsorship proceeds as overhead and investor return. 

An “earth fund” capitalised by revenue from business customers and sponsors provides a cash reserve to establish the value of a set number of circulating sustain credits, which fluctuate transparently with the fund balance. Our platform will be augmented for automation, gamification and e-commerce to drive both participation and commercial revenue streams.

A sustain credit can be 1) liquidated for cash or 2) paid-forward in donation, it will also be 3) redeemable in Planazon - our planned e-commerce platform hosting sustainable and circular-economy products. This opens additional retail and sponsorship streams including storefront merchant fees. 

Passionate individuals and organisations restoring nature are often undervalued, understaffed and underpaid. 

Our premise is that these nature workers (i.e., “earth doctors”) should receive economic inducement not only for the work they do, but so that they and others will seek additive opportunities to perform greater volumes of nature restoration work. Many of these people and organizations are in the developing world, where an otherwise nominal token value can over time represent a meaningful wage. 

The separate target population we’ll support are the customers for nature work - purchasers of sustainability and corporate responsibility services, and ESG and impact investors committing funds to nature restoration. These customers seek visibility, and faster and more permanent results, with less funds committed to overhead. 

With an early focus on building the supply side of fundable projects and participating communities, we now have 35,319 earth doctors representing 584 communities across 99 countries and territories, many in developing countries. Almost the entirety of our work so far has been dedicated to engaging the communities we serve. 

These volunteer earth doctors have planted and maintained 26,715 trees; rescued 2,619,357 litres of plastics from nature; protected 12 animals; and they’ve engaged in 235 social awareness activities, all earning pre-issued sustain credits.

Across varied social media channels, we celebrate daily the successes of our community volunteers globally, some of whom have since become ambassadors for sustain credits, either promoting sustain credits or organizing greater numbers of volunteer earth doctors locally in their communities. 

Our CEO is an early graduate tech coder by schooling and previously scaled a startup to £1 million revenue in 3 years.

Our minimum viable product has been public and engaged with by hundreds, enlisting tens of thousands. It's not yet the platform we intend for revenue generation in presenting to business customers, but it has been very active with enlisting the participant volunteers on whose premise our product is built. 

We are creating a mass market tokenized reward system tied to environmental restoration activity, in service of U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. To that end, our CEO - a professional coder - would appreciate the technical support available through the density of talent in the MIT community, to build an infinitely extensible, post-MVP platform.

Separately, we have benefitted from the imprimatur of merely having been nominated dozens of times for the prestigious Earthshot Prize. An award from MIT Solve - monetary or not - would provide critical backing as we begin working on the “demand” side of the market for nature work, and solicit commercial revenue streams through business subscriptions. Work accomplished so far has been awarded credits without capital backing, and the attention garnered from an MIT Solve award can be handily used to help attract customers to capitalise the fund balance supporting the value of the fixed number of credits available to be issued or redeemed at a given time.

We also plan to onboard the talent required to refine a 2nd generation of reward metrics tied to fulfillment of U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. A tie to academia would be extremely helpful in doing so.

We are creating a mass market tokenized reward system tied to environmental restoration activity, in service of U.N. Sustainable Development Goals. There is a profusion of smartphone access in the developing world - where a sustain credit would be most economically meaningful, and where many of our new incoming users (earth doctors) are from.

Sustain credits is extensible to any SDG that can be fulfilled by volunteer individuals or organisations, and that can be unitized to metrics aligned with the goal. 

We do see disruptive scale potential across several markets, of which this initiative can plausibly capture 1% of activity:

Carbon credits and tree planting (2021) $814B →  $8.144B

Global philanthropy (2022) $810B → $8.1B 

Location based advertising (2021) $69B → $696M 

Plastic waste management (2021) $36.96B → $369M 

Climate philanthropy (2022) $10B → $100M 

Augmented reality gaming (2022) $4.5B → $45M 

eCommerce (2020) $4,822T → $48B

sustain credits is the next generation of nature credit, tied to digital gamification (e.g., “Pokemon GO” style augmented reality, and floating token value), and fully democratized participation. 

The technology and coding needed for the platform for our earth doctors and earth sponsors still have to be created and will be the beating heart of our tech company. Sustainable actions mine the sustain credits, and the monetary value will be delivered by a "point & click" based nature actions expanding platform.

Our prototype project submission portal relies on easy-to-access yet diffuse methods of entry that lends to creating manual labor. We need to move into production mode to property scale our system, with the technology and coding needed for the platform for our earth doctors and earth sponsors, and the Earthdoc Go app with augmented reality functionality for gamification and sponsorship purposes. We need to fund what is currently fully volunteer staff time to develop the following:

• Develop production-grade tech suitable to serve anticipated scale of project proof submissions and peer review process

• Develop the sustain credits ledger

• Develop the buyer interface

• Develop the sustain credits app for earth doctor uploads and “garden of eden” interface for merit awards

We would also appreciate connections to interested, mission-aligned investors. 

Near-term, we see impact across several metrics:

• Issuance of sustain credits for project completions

• Progress to establishing a target floor value for a credit, based upon volume of business sponsorship support

• Continued onboarding of earth doctors

• Trees planted and/or sustained to maturity

• Wildlife conserved to support biodiversity

• Plastics and other litter cleaned up, by litre

On the project-based metrics (the last 3 above), we’ll establish it through the digital MRV system we will build to replace our MVP. Verification of projects will be conducted via an innovative and transparent, Wikipedia-style system. 

We solve for SDGs 1, 8, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 17.

Core technology is referenced several times above

Our leadership team - and participants to date - are very diverse. Our CEO is ethnic Sri Lankan, our co-founder Dutch, and women from southeast Asia as key contributors. By our nature we are global and reach into every civilized continent, with particularly strong participation in Africa and southeast Asia, with our ambassadors representing a solid cultural cross-section. As an enterprise we operate as a strict meritocracy. Sustain credits’ brand identity promotes broad-based inclusivity aimed at the enfranchisement of  local communities.

We have individual plans and business monthly subscription plans, whereby individual people and businesses (collectively "earth sponsors") donate to the earth fund cash reserve, whose balance supports the floating monetary value of a set number of sustain credits that civic volunteers (earth doctors) receive for restoring nature. 

Business sponsors now have a platform to purchase CSR activity and reward regular, on-the-ground people restoring nature around the world. Of the monies arising from sustain credits selling sustainability and corporate responsibility services to businesses, 80% goes to the earth fund, and 20% covers overheads and profit for growth and investor return. 

Our model provides ample room for additional commercial revenue streams, besides corporate ESG, impact and philanthropy sponsorship. These additional streams include storefront fees for global merchants on our eco-marketplace planezon (where sustain credits tokens can also be redeemed for commercial products), and also sponsorships tied to our gamified, augmented reality platform. 

We will target Chief Sustainability officers of businesses in Europe and the US that are interested in BOTH offsetting and additionally CSR. Ecologi - a relatively close comparison - has 18,000 businesses sequestering carbon through middleman services. We will target these businesses by providing a democratised, direct and superior alternative: carbon sequestration AND nature restoration both, and the CSR narratives behind the grassroots actors (people like you and me) restoring nature on their behalf. We will reach them through LinkedIn, performance marketing and automated sales hacks. We have achieved 12 nominations to the Earthshot Prize 2023, past the second stage and are hopeful of becoming a finalist - which means promotional exposure on BBC, CNN etc and the patronage of HRH Prince William and Sir David Attenborough.

We will reserve 20% of business sustainability customer proceeds to feed back into the system. Our post-MVP platform accommodates several additional commercial revenue streams. These include sponsorships within the augmented reality system (e.g., a geo-fenced area where litter pickup is temporarily worth 5x credits), and storefront fees from the eco-marketplace planazon where tokens may be redeemable as an alternative to being cashed.

We are currently bootstrapped and this question is too early.