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In today's era, global warming has become one of the concerns of regulatory agendas in most countries around the world. In 2015, within the UNFCCC, several countries made an agreement to mitigate global warming under the Paris Agreement. The goal of the Paris Agreement, is to keep the global rise in temperature of the century to well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The United Nations performs an assessment of all the current efforts at mitigation by the nations. Another organization striving to promote this movement is the World Bank. However, the $40 billion World Bank’s budget directed towards the cause, has not yielded the estimated result. In order to get the required results, one needs to establish the economic benefits of  sustainable development and environment protection.

Our team has devised a system which aims at promoting the economic development of any nation willing to participate and adhere to ecological and sustainable development practices. We leverage the trust, security and transparency provided by the blockchain technology to distribute tokens to nations based on their pollution index. If the nation has a threshold less than the calculated threshold as per the agreement provided by them, the blockchain incentivises that nation with a green token. These tokens can further have a GDP value pegged to them and this can be used by the nations to borrow loans from the World Bank as well as improve their own economy. This way, we are neutralising the threat to economic development, especially for the developing nations and incentivizing the right asset - living harmoniously with nature.

The logic for this process resides on the smart contracts on the blockchain and the data will be directly captures from the IOT devices installed at the pollution monitoring stations, thereby removing human intervention. The data is further processed every quarter using Machine Learning algorithms to assess the trend in pollution levels across each nation and if an improvement is detected, then they will be rewarded with the tokens.  We currently have a prototype in place built for air pollution, where in, the data is collected from trusted government resources of India and processed on a contract on Ethereum blockchain to compare against the agreed upon threshold, to disburse tokens accordingly. We chose India as our case study since it is the perfect example of a developing nation struggling to tackle Global Warming and rendered helpless due to its economic state.

Air, land, and water pollution caused 9 million premature deaths in 2016, or 16% of all deaths worldwide. About 92% of all pollution-related mortality is seen in low-income and middle-income countries, with the poor, marginalized, and young hit hardest by the health effects of this contamination. After looking at this fact, the 126 developing countries all over the world, are our main focus. We would like to help them increase their quality of life by curbing pollution, since it is one of the biggest threats to life in today’s world.

Meigy Ulina, Kushan Singh, Srihari Nanniyur

http://greenblox.herokuapp.com/

https://github.com/kushan22/GoGreenBlock