Roots

Urban populations almost always contribute a lot more to climate change than rural ones. But people living in cities usually have a higher earning potential. I propose using the gap in earnings between urban and rural populations to close the gap between the net carbon contribution of the populations.

An app in which people who are near an area where plants can be grown (planters) can sign up. Those who want to donate money to plant trees (donors) can give money directly to a planter after checking his or her profile. The planter will then need to send pictures of the planted trees to the donor. The app will provide information about tree plantation in local languages, preferably also in speech for those who are illiterate. It can be used to connect sellers of seeds to planters. The app will list activities which contribute to climate change and their quantitative environmental impact. Donors will be able to log their activities. For example, it will be able to log in distances travelled in a vehicle, and automatically calculate the fuel used if the user has previously entered the mileage of the vehicle. It may also be connected to a home’s electricity meter. The app will use this information to calculate the total carbon dioxide contribution of the donor, the type and number of trees needed to offset it, and the amount of money the donor would need to pay to a planter. The planter might be in a different country with a lower minimum wage and a lower value currency. So planting a tree might end up costing a relatively small amount of money for the donor, but those small sums of money may become a source of livelihood for the planter.

My solution helps rural and urban people coordinate to solve both their problems: the inability of urban populations to easily offset their carbon contributions and the lack of jobs for rural populations. In the ideal case, if everyone in the world properly takes part in this, there will be almost no net carbon contributions by individual citizens.

I am a city dweller. From the time I learned about climate change in school, I’ve wanted to plant trees. But I didn’t even start till I was 19. Why? Because there was no place near my home where I could. Besides, people are supposed to do what they are good at. To give a rather extreme example, if a doctor plants trees instead of treating patients, he is not only harming himself (by earning less money), he is also harming the society because he could have used the money he earned to give someone a job. 

My personal experience affirms what Bill Gates said in his commencement speech to Harvard: many of us don’t try to stop climate change ‘not because we [don’t] care, but because we [don’t] know what to do’. Many people are genuinely worried about the environment but they don’t take any important steps to reduce their carbon footprint because it would take a significant portion of their busy lives, all the while there are poor unemployed or underemployed people with a lot of time on their hands and a dire need of money. My solution is, in fact, a trade in time.

My solution will benefit both urban and rural people. People living in cities will be able to offset their carbon contributions without having to take a lot of time out of their lives while farmers, especially in poor countries, will get an extra job that requires almost the same skill set as their regular job. In the long-term, of course, everyone will benefit if we are able to prevent climate change. The deployment of the solution on a global scale is the biggest challenge I am facing because most poor people don’t own smartphones or have access to the internet.

Track the number of trees planted using the app - 100, 000 trees planted

Track money transfer in the app store - $10, 000 transferred from urban to rural economies

Track downloads in the app store - 10, 000 people download our app

My solution uses the internet for its most basic function: connecting people to coordinate human activities. In this case, we are connecting urban and rural populations. City dwellers have money but little time or space for planting trees while rural farmers have the time and the land to plant trees but are unemployed or underemployed. My solution aims to help people share the resources they have and are in a unique position to possess. If successfully implemented, both urban and rural populations will be able to share their resources for a common cause, without having to physically meet each other.

The entire premise of my solution is based on coordination and trade among people. Just as money helps people who don’t know each other to take part in cooperative human endeavors, this solution also helps people who are physically far apart to trade in order to achieve something which is in both their interests. This reliance of the technology on people is as much a challenge as an opportunity. We would need to not only implement the technology but also convince people to live carbon-neutral lives. We would also need to provide the poor with the means of connectivity.

This is the biggest challenge for my solution. The full deployment of my solution rests on poor people having smartphones, which they don’t. In the present situation, the denizens of cities and villages in relatively developed countries can cooperate with each other to plant trees and reduce climate change. It will lead to our primary goal of more trees being planted and we will make some progress on the secondary goal of distribution of wealth. But to plant a large number of trees, we would need people in developing countries to have smartphones because most farmers are in developing countries.

I do not want to say this, but my solution has to work on volunteerism. There are very little overhead costs associated with the solution. All I really need are volunteers who program and help illiterate people set up the system on their phones. Taking a cut of the relatively small amounts of donations is simply not acceptable. What I need from the Solve community is ‘diplomatic’ support. I understand that the transactions for the transfer of money between donors and planters must be without fees if the project is to succeed because there will be lots of transactions for small amounts of money. That would need some negotiation with financial services corporations, and that’s not something I can do on my own. I would need the Solve Community’s help and reputation to convince financial services corporations to provide their services to this program for free.

I would need to run a campaign to get rural people to sign up for the app and make their profiles, many of whom will be illiterate. Once I get this started, it would be relatively easier to get more farmers to sign up using ‘success stories’. The more volunteers we have, the faster our solution will succeed.

I would also need to set up a system to set the price automatically based on location so donors and planters don’t have to negotiate. I am thinking of simply using the minimum wage, but I might need a more complex model.

I am applying to Solve because I am a 19-year-old who can barely speak English and I need the help of financial services corporations to put my solution into action. I can’t convince Visa and MasterCard to give their services to poor people for free; I’d need the help of the Solve community. A smaller reason is that I have just learned how to program and the app I made is, frankly, ugly. I have taken Sustainable Food Security: Crop Production from edX to become a little familiar with the subject, but I still know very little about tree plantation.

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