Using Blockchain Technology to Protect Nature and Climate

Eduardo: [00:00:00] Today’s episode we have Walid Al Saqqaf CEO and co-founder at Rebalance Earth, a global ecosystem services platform for valuing and funding a living nature to combat climate change, biodiversity loss, and supporting human welfare. Walid is also the founder of Insureblocks, the leading blockchain educational podcast and boutique consultancy firm that supports companies and industry metamorphose into digital natives.

Wal is a serial entrepreneur, and has co-founded seven startups so far. So Walid welcome to the show.

Walid: Thank you for having me Eduardo. It’s a pleasure.

Eduardo: . Walid tell us a little bit about your journey. You know, how do you get started? You have, well, wow. Seven startups. That’s an amazing journey and how do you end up co-founding Rebalance Earth?

Walid: It’s amazing, but perhaps also a very painful journey. Any startup founder who’s listening right now will understand how difficult it is to start up, you know, a new [00:01:00] business. It can be very challenging. So, doing seven is both fun, highly educational, but also very stressful as to why Rebalance Earth and how they come about.

Today in truth, it’s because of one man Ralph Chami my co-founder. Cause I was doing a podcast with Marianne Schoerling from Geneva Macro Labs on how blockchain is being used by the by institutions around the world to help hit United Nation SDGs. And during the podcast she mentioned a speaker she had at that conference, Ralph Chami, that was talking about the valuation of the whales.

So that got me interested and I decided to do a little bit of research and I found out his articles that said, a great whale is worth $2 million alive for its carbon sequestration services it performs in the ocean, but $50,000 dead for the countries that still eat whale. That was very interesting.

So I called up, I tried to connect with Ralph on LinkedIn, [00:02:00] and then he told me that the forest elephant is worth $40,000 dead. But $ 1.75 million alive for the carbon sequestration services it does in the forest. So this is done by a senior economist at the IMF. This is not some lonely think tank from somewhere.

And when I read this or heard Ralph talk about this, three things happen to me. One is this realization that we only value nature when it’s dead and not when it’s alive. And the second thing that happened was now my, my daughters are a little bit older, but they’re soon to be 12 and 10 year old.

When I read that, I was like, I refuse to accept that my daughters grew up in a world with such crummy values. And the third and final thing is I actually had an idea on how I can solve this. So because of this article, this is, I think it’s, what’s important is that for [00:03:00] any scientist, economists listening around the world, you never know that what you write, especially if you communicate it in a clear, simple way for simpletons like me to understand, then it can spark an idea for an action to try and change this, this set of inappropriate values, only value nature when it’s dead than when it’s alive. So that’s what’s provided the spark to do something. And then I can happily tell you a little bit more about how it, it all began, but that was the spark.

Eduardo: Super interesting. So give us a 10,000 foot level view of Rebalance Earth and how it solves that problem of biodiversity loss.

Walid: It solves a number of problems.

Let’s take a little journey in history. Since 1960s we as a global human society have experienced extraordinary growth. GDP growth has grown by 5000%, and that has provided great wealth to countries and people around the world.

Now, [00:04:00] this economic growth was underpinned by effectively treating nature as a not valuable monetary resource. You extract the oil out of the earth, you extract the gas, you chop the trees, you kill the elephants for the ivory. These were all done for free. You know, you just take it out. But that begs the question of can you have infinite economic growth on the planet of finite resources? The simple answer is you can’t. Eventually, you’re gonna run out of things to dig out. You’re gonna run out of trees to to chop down, you’re gonna run out of elephants to kill. That is why the elephants, such as the forest elephants are gonna go extinct in 10 years time, and they’re unfortunately gonna be joining large growing number of species who are on a path to extinction.

Not just because we’re hunting them, but because we’re destroying the [00:05:00] ecosystems they live in. I’ll give you an example. Last month, the Democratic Republic of Congo has put for sale a huge piece of land, I think close to the size of France that is right in the middle of the country to oil companies.

All the species there, a lot of them are gonna leave. Are gonna just are gonna die. So Rebalance Earth is here to do one fundamental thing. It is to provide a funding and valuing mechanism for nature. If you suddenly put a real strong value to nature alive, not as dead, then suddenly you have to factor the economic cost of

killing a living nature. And if that cost is too high, you will not perform that. But it’s something you, you realize you can monetize a living [00:06:00] nature that works for you and grows the economy, then you have a much better model. And that’s what Rebalance Earth is here to do, is by enabling nature to have a monetary value as a living resource.

That can underpin a new paradigm of economic growth where we have economic growth, creation of wealth, distribution of wealth that is based on the living nature instead of a dead nature. So how do you do that? You do that by linking nature to a a market. Now, unfortunately, the only market that exists today is the carbon market.

We’re all globally entering a recession, and one of the only markets that is growing rapidly is the carbon market because companies around the world are being pressured by regulation, by consumers, by the press, and by a number [00:07:00] of other stakeholders to make net zero commitments and to stick to them. And that involves, to some degree, buying carbon credits or carbon offsets.

Traditionally that goes through forest, right? But now through the work that our colleague, Fabio Berzaghi has done, which the IMF has based itself on, it has demonstrated a forest elephant provides services in the forest that boosts a forest capacity to absorb carbon. So you can link the services an elephant does to the carbon markets. So suddenly we can give corporations around the world, the Microsoft, the Cartiers, the the Barclays, the British Airways, all those guys, the opportunity to employ the services performed by forest elephants and other keystone species because those services produces carbon credits.

But in the future, because biodiversity credits is the [00:08:00] golden egg. But there is not enough science to really understand it. But in the future, you will also be able to get biodiversity credits by employing the services of a forest elephant and then hopefully a great whale, the wolves and other keystone.

So Eduardo, what, what I’m describing to you is that instead of a poacher, aiming its gun to kill an elephant. That poacher can use that gun as a park ranger to protect that forest elephant and receive an income because that elephant is worth $2 million in services it provides to corporates. You kill that elephant.

You go to jail and you have a $2 million liability on your head that changes the dynamic and suddenly you have a system in place. It is in countries and corporations, economic interest to protect nature, to build a new economic paradigm on a living nature. [00:09:00] That’s what Rebalance Earth fundamentally at a high level perspective.

Eduardo: You have an interesting concept here of ecosystem services provided by the elephant. Can you tell us exactly what is the elephant doing that makes it services so valuable?

Walid: Ecosystem services is, to put it very bluntly, an elephant or a keystone species lives within a certain area and within that certain area, that ecosystem, the elephant does a number of activities within it.

The portion of the ecosystem services that is related to the carbon market is the one where the elephant destroys a lot of the smaller plants in the forest. What this does is that effectively it thins out the forest. Which means that the older trees grow thicker trunk, and grow taller because they do not have to fight as much for natural resources.

That means those trees, because they’re thicker, they [00:10:00] absorb more carbon. So that’s how they boost the carbon productivity by 7%. The other thing the elephant does is that it’s one of the few animals who can eat the fruits of that tree but digest them just enough that when it does it dung the poop of the elephant.

One metric ton of dunk every week the elephant spreads the nutrients of the fruits across the forest, so it makes sure that the soil is rich in nutrients, which is good for the trees, but also the seeds from those fruits will give birth to new trees. That is why my other co-founder Ian Redmond, in an affectionate way,

I like to call him a cross between David Attenborough and Indiana Jones. But, you know, he knows the elephants inside out for the last 40 years and he calls them the great gardeners of the rainforest. And that’s what they do. So that service of [00:11:00] thinning out the forest, eating the fruits, pooping them out is what creates a 7% lift in carbon sequestration.

But what the elephant does also, and I, I dunno if you can see it on the pictures, and for the listeners who are just listening, the elephant also digs a lot of holes. He digs a lot of water holes in the forest, and that sustains other species who needs the water from holes. The elephant also has a tendency of disturbing like nests of insects.

So the insects go flying everywhere, and then the birds come in and eat the insects. So the, the elephant does a huge amount of stuff within the forest that supports other species within it. That’s what we mean by ecosystem services. Part of this work also ensures that the forest has a very high level of humidity.

Which is very important because that humidity rises and as it comes back down in the form of rain, especially the humidity from the Congo tropical rainforest provides a rain water for the Egyptian farmers. It [00:12:00] provides rainwater for the whole Sahel region in the form of drinking water. All that thanks to the elephant if the elephant goes extinct as it expected in the next 10 years,

the Congo Tropical rainforest, which is the second largest rainforest in the world, will shrink. And with that, the humidity with that, the drinking water for the Sahel region, the the water that feeds into the Nile will also shrink. And you suddenly have a situation where you can have up to 120 million people facing water scarcity that brings social unrest,

that brings migration, that brings a lot of problems and wars. We live as humans. We forget that we’re not just a special, animal out there. We have to remember we’re interconnected to nature. Just like the elephant supports the ecosystem. We are interconnected to the forest elephant [00:13:00] just like we are to many other species. And the more

we ignore that, the more we do it at our peril. And that’s something we invite everyone to consider and to start integrating our thinking, our philosophy, our economies based on living nature. Because that’s the only way we’re gonna save it. I love the work that charities and institutions are doing.

Unfortunately, they have not been able to change much in spite of their enormous heart and great work. We have to work with finance, we have to work with the markets. That’s the only way we’re gonna have systemic change.

Eduardo: Yeah. That’s fascinating. It’s known that the services that are providing these keystone species are very, very valuable.

And so the, the mechanism that you have created to translate that into actually economic value that can be basically distributed to people and communities. Let’s walk through the mechanics [00:14:00] of how that happens. How are you making that magic happen?

Walid: Sure. So just to comment very rapidly in what you just said. For me, the genius is, is in what Ralph did.

Ralph Chami. Because scientists understand their science very well, and they can tell you about the problems we’re all facing, but they’re not always the best communicators of the science. A lot of their report is, is in very technical language, which most people do not understand. What Ralph and his team did is that they spent a lot of time as a scientist understanding the signs and translating it into economic language. To say, well, you lose a species,

you lose trillions of dollars of value in that format. Okay? So suddenly that gets the interest of the money man. But then you’ve gotta take that, to take the science, you build a valuation mechanism, you’ve gotta put it into a product or into an asset of some sort. And that’s a piece if you want that

I came in and said, actually I can build on what you guys have done, because I didn’t create [00:15:00] this out of nothing. I, I’m basing myself on the work that Fabio has done in the science, the work that Ralph has done in terms of the economic and valuation mechanism. And in terms of the knowledge that Ian has about conservationism, I brought in the technology side, which is how can we understand this is the valuation of an elephant?

How can we then change that into a product that is robust enough for investors or buyers to purchase and to monitor. So if you understand how the forest elephant creates its value, then all I did is I said, Okay, let’s put that into a token. Okay? We’re gonna say that every day an elephant is recognized as alive, that elephant produces

a value of $40 that is generated from the carbon [00:16:00] credit you can receive, the biodiversity credit you can receive, and also the ESG credit you can receive for the support you do for local communities. So imagine a situation, where in the forest is there forest elephants? There are a number of sensors. Here I’m talking about motion activated camera traps.

We take pictures and acoustic sensors that listens to the unique sound every animal makes. You also have park rangers who do DNA tests of the dung. All those sensors are here to do one purpose, identify a unique living elephant for every day. We can do that. We produce a token of a value of $40. Now you, you could be, let’s say Apple. Apple buys this one token, okay?

They get $40 ecosystem services credit, which comes in the form of a carbon credit, which is tradeable on the market in a form of a biodiversity credit and an ESG credit. What happens to that [00:17:00] $40? Well, the vast majority of the funds goes to pay the Park Ranger because that Park Ranger needs to get a decent

income training and equipment because he or she’s protecting an asset, worth close to $2 million, Right? That’s a lot more value. So you need to pay them correctly. And even today, park rangers are paid crummy little salaries, yet they’re the thin line of defense protecting nature for us. Right? And even the little bit amount of money they have supports up to 20 people in their local community.

So we wanna make sure that Park Rangers are paid a good amount of money for the valuable work they’re doing. The majority of the value of the $40 goes in the form of micro investments into the local communities that live in the surrounding area where the elephant is. What does that micro investment mean?

It means investing in education. It means investing in healthcare, in job creation, [00:18:00] but also investing in a microfund. That invest in women to set up their own businesses because the data has proven it over and over again: the health of a society is determined by the financial and educational empowerment of women.

So we wanna support this. So imagine Eduardo a farmer, suddenly has a new clinic, health clinic, where he can take his, his daughter or his son to, and at the entrance of the clinic, it’s got a little placard that says, paid for by your local elephants. You know, it’s about linking the economic health and educational wealth of that community to how well the elephants are thriving.

So by doing this, you’re stopping the poaching because you’re transforming poachers into park ranger. Providing a steady income and you’re stopping the other big [00:19:00] source of killing of elephants, it’s human-wildlife conflict because suddenly you’ve linked the economic health and educational development of that society to the welfare of the animal.

And it’s by creating those virtuous circles and all that transfer of value from the creation of that token of $40 to the purchase of that token by Apple, and the distribution of funds to the park rangers and the local communities is all tracked on an enterprise blockchain to provide the transparency.

The traceability and the trust. So what do I mean by that? Imagine you’re Apple. You just bought that token. You can actually click on the token and see the picture or the video of the elephant who produced that token on that day. That’s a level of transparency. You can also click on the token to see which park ranger has received

an income from that, a salary from that. You can see how many poachers he or she has [00:20:00] intercepted, how many DNA tests they’ve done. You get a kind of a report card on their performance, and you can see how much of that money is also gone in the investment to providing new computers for a school or new books.

It’s about this end to end traceability for the corporate buyer, but also for the local community. They can see that the funds came in from Apple, they came in from some other company, and that no politicians took the money and ran away with it because it’s all tracked on a blockchain. And just one more word on blockchain, why we’re using this technology?

Because it’s very strong. it’s a trust building technology. But critically, the one that we’re using is by a company called R3 Corda, which is an enterprise financial institution. If you compare the energy consumption. So Bitcoin uses 125 million Joules of electricity for every transaction.

Ethereum has just upgraded, but before it used to be 17.7 million [00:21:00] Joules, ours uses 24.7. That’s it. So the cost of a transaction on our platform is less than the cost of an email. So it is a super energy efficient platform and it provides bank grade security, which is very important for the corporate clients, but also the governments with whom we talk to.

Eduardo: One thing that comes to mind is as you’re implementing this technology, you’re solving a lot of bottlenecks that are intrinsic to the carbon credit issuance. To issue a carbon credit there’s a six to 18 month lead time for going into verification and certification and everything that needs to happen before the actual credit gets issued, sold, and then the money flows back to the farmer.

You’re creating something in which basically a lot of the origination is automated. You have AI, you have cameras, you have sensors. And this, this gets immediately read and translated into credit. So making the process a lot more efficient.

Walid: It is about efficiency gain is also to ensure that we do not have middle men in, in the procedure of the credit [00:22:00] process who can enrich themselves. This is ensuring that as much of every dollar pound, euro, whatever goes to the local communities as much as possible. Just one more word regarding technology. See, a lot of the technology approach to the carbon is in what’s called carbon capture storage or carbon capture technology where you have machinery that is used to absorb carbon from the air and effectively put it deep underground.

Now the fight against climate change requires all kinds of different approaches to tackling that, including carbon capture technology. The thing that we need to recognize is that this kind of technology is nascent and it’s quite untested. The city of Copenhagen, for example, recently announced that it’s not gonna be able to reach its net zero target by 2025.

Mainly because the carbon capture storage technology it was using did not deliver as what it hoped. I think technology [00:23:00] has an important role to play with the biggest tech that exists out there. Nature, Nature is the number one technology we have out there to use in the fight against climate change.

The difference between nature and carbon capture storage technology is that the machinery we build, we understand the inputs and we understand the outputs, right? And with that, you know, if you put a dollar, you’ll get this out and you can put down on a balance sheet with nature is very different, right?

Nature is so interconnected, it’s so complex. So we’re like, Eeeeh! I’m not gonna go into that. I like nature, but this is too complicated. And this is where we have a slightly different approach. We say, here’s nature tech. Here’s blockchain, artificial intelligence, internet of things, we can use the two together where we can use all these technologies to help us understand and monitor nature so that we start translating all that into the inputs and outputs that most companies understand.

So [00:24:00] that’s all we’ve done as Rebalance Earth, is to try and use all the most modern, innovative technologies that exists out there to work in partnership with Nature Tech, to give a solution that is understood by shareholders in large companies, for them to be able to buy in confidence because it’s all underpinned

through this trust technology called blockchain. So that’s the approach of how we use technology with Nature Tech.

Eduardo: Another thing that is super cool about this whole approach of ecosystem services and valuing the services that keystone species are providing is that it builds a connection to nature. And it’s not like, Hey, we’re gonna measure this carbon sequestration capacity of this forests with this like satellite imagery and visual ai. And somehow this is a black box cannot be touched. Here you’re building sort of an interaction. Mechanism between humans [00:25:00] and the foundations of the, the living blocks, basically that, that ensure that the ecosystem is in good state.

Walid: Yeah. And there’s different ways you can do it and, you know, We’re not inventing anything new, we’re just taking things that already exist. Have been tried and tested and we’re just packaging them in a different way. I don’t know if you remember, I mean you can still do it today. You can still buy a polar bear toy, you from WWF and say, Hey, your polar bear is doing well.

It’s kind of trying to create this connection, but what we have is closer to a near real time connection. Where you can, you can get those pictures, those videos or sound files of the elephants, you know, as often as they become available through our sensors. And it’s about making this personal. Let me give you an example.

Let’s say you were to fly from London to New York with British Airways, okay? You could offset your flight by supporting their initiative in the rainforest. That feels good. You do it, and that’s it. Now imagine instead it says, Do you wish to [00:26:00] offset your flight by getting Susie the elephant to offset it for you through its ecosystem services?

Here’s a video of Susie doing that work for the last passenger yesterday. So you can see it. So you just need to scan this QR code. Boom. Okay. I’ve offset the flight. When you land, you have a video that says, Actually here’s Susie who’s done the work for your flight today.

You can then show it to your friends and your family and say, Look, I offset my flight and this is Susie the elephant. And I can see where actually my money has gone to pay Audrée the park ranger. And you can see that it’s about creating a viral coefficient. You want to empower people with stories about what they did to support nature, and you wanna empower them with stories which are like Twitter size, you know, which are short, impactful, and meaningful.

So that others will also want to do it because we all want to do something about nature, [00:27:00] but you need this instant feedback kind of loop if you want, and then we can provide it to you for individuals as we can for corporate.

Eduardo: Are there some instances where carbon credits are more appropriate than ecosystem services credits?

Walid: So ecosystem services includes a carbon credit, so it’s not one or the other.

People use different terminology. So for example I was at Cup 26 in Glasgow, and what people were talking about is this concept of carbon plus credits. What is Carbon Plus? It’s basically a regular carbon credit mixed with some biodiversity and mixed with some human rights. That’s what we call, if you want, our ecosystem services credits.

We use that term because it’s more specific to the work that keystone species do. It is ecosystem services. But it could be branded. That’s Carbon plus if they wish to, but I, I come from the fundamental belief that carbon is a siloed approach to the problems we’re facing. [00:28:00] Cause climate change is what’s linked to the carbon markets is interlinked to the loss of biodiversity.

If we lose biodiversity, we have no chance in hell of fighting climate change because biodiversity is response for absorbing more than 60% of all the carbon we have around the world. We lose that? Game over. Climate change, loss of biodiversity affects how many species are gonna go extinct, extinction of species.

And those three factors affects human welfare, loss of biodiversity. Climate change affects human health to a significant degree. It affects poverty. According to the World Bank, by 2030, 120 million people are gonna enter poverty. Because of climate change and loss of biodiversity, we are all interconnected.

So having a strategy that’s based on just carbon credits is not sufficient. We believe [00:29:00] Ecosystem services credits, or if you want, as an investor of ecosystem service credits, because I have a big problem with offsets. See offsets is you buy something, you’re done. Finish.You feel good? Okay, I’ve done something.

But as an investor, you have a stake in it, right? You’re interested if you buy shares in crypto or in a company, you want to know what the CEO is gonna say. You wanna see what the share price is gonna move you. You know, you have a stake in it. You want to understand it. Now, imagine if you’re an investor in ecosystem services credit. You are gonna be interested to know are the elephant population growing? Are the orangutan population growing? Are the whales population growing?

Because that will affect the value of your investment. If you’re an investor, comes the conversation of what is my financial return? And the financial return comes in a number of ways. One of them is you get a carbon credit, so that is tradable. You get a biodiversity credit, which hopefully [00:30:00] very soon will be tradable and you get an ESG credit, which is especially valuable for for corporates.

But one of the notions we’re playing around with is: now elephants. Of course, they’re land animals. They operate within a certain territory. Now, I imagine in one territory, let’s imagine there’s just one hectare of land, there are trees. Now the trees, let’s say, provide a value of a million dollars, but because of the forest elephant’s value, related to the carbon markets, you’re adding an extra, let’s say million. So that’s 2 million You’re getting out of that hectare of land. So if you’re investing, not in buying the land, cause we’re not at all supporting this, but if you’re investing in the services that are produced on that land, just like a farmer, you can invest in a crop, the crops that comes out.

Here, you’re investing in the service that are produced by that land, through the work that Rebalance Earth does in that hectare of land, we cannot just do the elephant, but we can also do the chimps and we can do the hyenas, we can do other species. So suddenly that one [00:31:00] hector of land that you’ve invested in could be worth five or $ 10 million because we’ve identified the services produced by those other species.

Within that, now you start having a conversation where there is real financial return for investing in the services that are produced by the land. Does that make sense? So that’s kind of the approach we’re trying to work with our clients, which is forget the conversation of an offset, become an investor in nature, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it is one that will provide you a strong financial return.

And the one final thing I wanted to add, the data has demonstrated that corporations who have a clear sustainability strategy against climate change and loss of biodiversity and they can prove it, get a 6% rise in their share price. Now, tell me which CEO around the world does not want to get a 6%

rise in their share price. They all want it, [00:32:00] but you can do it in the right way, and that’s what we can offer.

Eduardo: Question just comes to mind as you’re thinking about different keystone species in the same acre of land wouldn’t you run into overlap or duplicity on the effect of such services, and then how will you possibly account for that?

Walid: Yeah, of course. And you know what? I don’t have the answer to that yet because we still have to launch with our first keystone later this year. But yes, the thing is, everything we do has kind of three stages. It has to be incredibly scientifically proven. So we work with a global team of scientists who spend a lot of time studying, for example, the forest elephant, the orangutans and other species.

Once we have a strong scientific basis, we then put it into our product, and that’s when the tech comes in. How can we monitor and trace in a transparent manner, the transfer of value. And the third one is what we call, how do we make sure it is encoded within a strong terms of ethics?

Because [00:33:00] let’s imagine a scenario that a local community says, you know what, we’re making a thousand dollars every day from those forest elephants. Forest elephants are migratory animals. They don’t stay put, so they’re gonna move out. You’re gonna lose a thousand dollars a day, you may be tempted as a local community to build a fence, to keep those elephants there. So that’s why I’m saying is that everything we do has to be scientifically proven and delivered with the best technology and monitored with a strong code of ethics so that we can predict potential problems and how we can mitigate those problems.

Coming back to your exact question, I do not know how much overlap there will be with different species that will most likely be in. But what we do know is that species are interdependent on each other. Once one species starts to drop too much in numbers or grow too much in numbers, it affects the others.

Now, a lot of it, you’ve got to let nature do its own stuff and give it time. We cannot intervene because most of the time we’re clueless as humans on what we should be doing or shouldn’t be [00:34:00] doing. The only one thing that Rebalance Earth is doing is to minimize human impact on nature. That’s what we’re here to do.

And to actually remove that human impact and foster an environment where elephants, whales, rhinos, giraffes, can grow back to their original numbers before we decided to step in and mess it up.

Eduardo: You’re creating really a platform and a framework. For any keystone species in any ecosystem to be able to use it.

Do you see a point in which you can use this platform in other geographies with other keystone species and plugging into the infrastructure you have created?

Walid: Absolutely. See, we can’t do it all ourselves. We are creating the infrastructure and infrastructure comes in two ways, right?

There is the technology infrastructure. But there’s also the science framework. We need to build a very robust science framework, and we can only do it by launching ourselves with a number of keystone species and test the robustness of our science model. Because once it’s strong enough, then we can [00:35:00] enable any country around the world to upload their own keystone species onto our platform.

So you can have a situation where Indonesia can upload the orangutans and realize they can make more money from the orangutans than they can through palm oil or in the case of the DRC, they can realize instead of selling this plot of land to the oil companies, they can monetize all the keystone species, the great apes, the forest elephant, and many others and make as much money or nearly as much as extractive industries like oil and gas.

Because that’s the thing I want your listeners to really understand. Extractive industries such as oil and gas, they extract out of the earth. Eventually you run out. Regeneration where you regenerate biodiversity is limitless. If you’re a head of state and you can make 10 billion over the next 10 years, That’s interesting. Okay, so it’s roughly 1 billion [00:36:00] every year, but then someone comes and says, We can monetize your keystone species and make $700 million a year. Not as much, but it’s more than 10 years. It’s 20, it’s 50, a hundred, thousands of years.

That makes more sense. So that’s, that’s what we wanna do is to have a platform that is scalable from a science model from a technology model from an international model so that any country around the world can leverage it and upload their own keystone species on their own.

Eduardo: This brings us to the true concept of evergreen, right? And evergreen investment opposed

to having

a limited horizon and stranded assets and all kinds of problems. Okay. So talk to us a little bit about the challenges of implementing this technology and this frameworks. What are the necessary conditions and challenges you’re facing?

Walid: Eduardo if we were to go through all the bottlenecks we have, I don’t think your show is long enough. What we’re trying to [00:37:00] do has never been done to that degree.

Little bits here and there have been done by many different organizations, but as far as I’m aware, none of it has been brought together to the scale that we’re trying to achieve. So there are a number of challenges, which I like to think of as opportunities, is that in any country we need to work with, we need to be a licensed entity.

Now we wanna be the sole reseller of ecosystem services or keystone species. Those laws don’t really quite exist, so we have to work with the countries in which we’re operating and really draft a legal framework in which we can operate, so that, that requires some work. The other piece of work is of course, educating corporations to say, yes you can do an offset and nothing really wrong with an offset, but you can become an investor in nature.

You get the same value of an offset benefit, but you get a lot more. You get to invest in the future of a biodiversity credit, which will be worth, a lot more, and you get to save a keystone [00:38:00] species at the same time. It’s a lot of ands and pluses that comes with that. There’s also, again about education

whenever we say blockchain, people think of Bitcoin and we say, no we don’t do 125 million joules of electricity. We use just 24.7, but we have to work with local communities. Local communities are paramount to this. And unfortunately, local communities have been cheated way too often, where they’re told, you must do X and we will give you Y.

They do X and they get Y minus 80% or whatever because of corruption, because of failed promises and so on. That’s where again, our values and the blockchain comes in because it automates, the decisions that have been made through smart contracts. So when a payment has been made and it, and it is demonstrated, you’ve done X, Y, or Z, you receive the funds.

There’s no human intervention involved. That requires, again, a level of education to the local communities about what we do. So a lot of what we do, I guess you could resume it to education, [00:39:00] explaining to them why this is different, how we’re doing it, why it is safe. And at the end of the day, you demonstrated by launching a pilot.

And the proof is in the pudding. We can demonstrate it that the funds that we’re taking from Apple in an investor by the way, we don’t have Apple as a client by Apple if you’re listening, we’re more than welcome to talk to you. Would have gone to pay the park ranger salaries would’ve gone in investment in local communities, and we can demonstrate that the forest elephants, are safe.

Imagine if when we launch, we’re gonna take, a lot of data on numbers of forest elephants. We’re gonna take data on the state of the biodiversity area in which we are operating, we’re gonna do, DNA samples called e-DNA of the soil, of the land of the mosquitoes, because they bite a lot of other animals.

And we, we can know whether they’ve been bitten. We’ll take a snapshot of what is the biodiversity of that area. We’ll then take a snapshot of what is the educational level of those local communities, the health of those local communities. The job opportunities [00:40:00] of local communities, so we wanna take a snapshot and we’ll keep taking those snapshots like every quarter.

And see how has our work supported that? How has it helped the forest elephant population to grow? How has it helped to reduce these human wildlife conflict? The poaching? How has it helped increase the educational level of the local community, the health, the job creation? If we can track all these indices and monitor how they’ve improved, then I think it doesn’t matter whether you believe it or not, as long as you can read the data, the data will speak for itself.

Eduardo: Let’s shift gears a little bit and let me ask you about the corporate structure of Rebalance Earth. You have set up as a community interest company. Which prevents basically that you ever go public or you ever get sold. What does it mean for the company and what motivated you to set it up this way?

Walid: You pointed out at the beginning, this is my seventh startup. All of my other startups were equity funded companies. So limited [00:41:00] companies where you raise funding, an investor who puts money into the company, they expect to get 10, 20, a hundred times their money back. Right? And that happens through one of two ways acquisition or through going IPO listed on the stock market.

Now, I greatly believe that what Rebalance Earth is doing is incredibly important. But the way you do it is equally important, and that is, you’ve gotta be a values driven business. And we considered for a long time to go down the B Corp route, it’s great, but that doesn’t protect you from being acquired.

You know, so many companies had great visions, but once, they were acquired, they were transformed by the acquiring party into something else. This is a human movement. And I wanted to ensure that we were highly profitable. So we had the limited company aspect of being profit making. But I wanted a way to ensure that the profits were always going to achieving its mission to [00:42:00] the community.

The community being the worldwide community of, protecting nature, supporting human health and fighting climate change. And the best way to do that, was this unique legal structure that is in the uk called a community interest company that protects a company from acquisition and being an ipo, we can still receive money from investors and we can still give them dividends

and provide them a healthy economic return, but it cannot be through an acquisition or through an ipo. It’s interesting we’re having this podcast today because as you probably have heard, the founder of Patagonia Yvon Chouinard I think his name is pronounced has given away and I think $3 billion worth of value of his company, to a kind of a new legal structure that kind of set up trust to fight against climate change.

And I, I think where we’re coming in is from that kind of similar thinking, which is how can we make sure that the funds used are here to further our mission. As [00:43:00] far as we can, and our stakeholders are gonna be the keystone species. Our stakeholders are gonna be the local community. Our stakeholders are gonna be the staff, of Rebalance, but also the investors who believe in our mission and who want to make an economic return through the dividend structure that Rebalance will have.

So we are demonstrating, and if I may say so, hopefully as much as Patagonia in due course on how you can marry financial return and at the same time hitting, your mission statement, your vision within a strong code of ethics.

Eduardo: When I was reading the news of Patagonia the structure of Rebalance Earth came to mind and then I think, Wow, this is incredible.

And it really speaks to the purpose-first nature of the company. So congrats on that. Kudos.

Walid: Thank you.

Eduardo: If you had to make a call to action for corporate leaders who are looking to rebalance their impact what would be your call to action?

Walid: I think corporate leaders around the world are faced with a [00:44:00] dilemma of wanting to play their part to support the planet in some shape or form. They also have fiduciary duties regarding their shareholders and stakeholders, to still provide a return to their companies. So sometimes they find it hard to marry the two, and they also understand that they wanna support nature as much as possible.

There’s a lot of confusion on how to do that. It seems every week that the Guardian, discovers a story by some large corporate who try to do something, and it turns out it was greenwashing. So it’s very hard to find what is the right thing to do whilst at the same time, not angering your shareholders in a way.

And I think what Rebalance Earth offers is, is a balance between those competing needs. because as I said, everything we do is grounded in science and the best science that [00:45:00] is available. Even the IMF science is basically using the same approach that we’re having. So everything we do is based in science and it’s using the most efficient technologies out there to deliver on our mission. And as I said, we’re not into the field of offsets. We’re here in terms of providing an investible product for those corporate leaders that helps them to protect nature while still making a return on that investment. So it is in a way, a financial product that first and foremost protects nature, but provides a return.

And that will help corporate leaders to be able to make a decision that helps them navigate across those challenges. And then when they come back home and they have their dinner, with their families, they can show their kids. This is a video of the elephants that made my car company net zero on this day.

And they can show it through their [00:46:00] transparency and the traceability of our platform. It’s not just a corporate requirement, it is also a human requirement that we will fulfill. It’s to be able for them to share those stories. And let’s remember, we as humans, we’re storytellers. We like to sit around the fire and exchange stories.

I’m gonna give those corporate leaders an incredible story to share.

Eduardo: Can you just expand just a tad on how does the return materialize for the investor?

Walid: Sure. It’s a bit what I was explaining earlier on. So when you purchase the ecosystem services of a forest elephant, those services are for the entire ecosystem, which they operate in.

Right you’re gonna get a carbon credit. That’s what you get from an offset. But you also will get, because we’re working with a number of our standard partners around the world, a biodiversity credit, which is becoming more and more valuable and you get this ESG credit, which is the support you provide to the local communities.

But because you’re kind of investing in the area in which the elephant operates in, [00:47:00] as we understand the biodiversity more, the value of that credit will increase. And as we start mapping out the other species, you can also leverage from the work that is done from those other species. So that’s how your credit will rise in value over time.

This is a mechanism that we need to perfect, that we need to test out, but we believe that the future is through an investment narrative instead of an offset narrative. Because an offset is a one of transaction. And as a corporate leader, I need to be able to plan out, my returns, my investment over years and an offset is a one-off.

we offer also a financial product that is more in line with the way corporates operate.

Eduardo: Well, it, it’s been amazing. How can investors and the public in general learn more about Rebalance Earth and probably get in touch with you in case they have

questions?

Walid: Sure. Well, we update regularly our website, so it’s Rebalance.earth. You [00:48:00] can also find us on the regular social media channels.

The best one probably is LinkedIn. You can always connect with me on LinkedIn. I’ll be always happy to have a conversation and tell you more about us. As I said, you know, we’re three co-founders but we also have a team of professional volunteers from all around the world who have been supporting Rebalance Earth since the beginning.

And so if you have some key skills that you’d like to contribute, then we would love to have a conversation with you.

Eduardo: Excellent. Ready for the

rapid

five?

Walid: Yes. Go for it.

Eduardo: Walid, what’s your top author or book?

Walid: I’m not sure if it’s the top of, The first one that comes to mind is Dee Hock. He was the founder of Visa.

He unfortunately died this year at the age of 93. And he wrote the book One From Many.

Eduardo: Great. Number two is what climate leader do you look up to or inspires

you?

Walid: In some ways after the announcement what the founder of Patagonia has done, I would say it would have to be him . It changed a lot there’s so many leaders [00:49:00] around the world, which amaze me by their work even, there’s David Attenborough and so on. But yeah, right now, today it’s Yvon Chouinard.

Eduardo: Number three is if you had a magic wand, what will be the one thing you will change today or problem you will solve?

Walid: One thing, I’ll go back in time, when that, that article that was done by one of the scientists from Exxon, the petrol company I think it was in the sixties or 70 that said that oil and carbon is gonna have an impact on climate change.

I would make sure that we all listen to it because stopping the climate change problem in the sixties or seventies is a lot easier than it is now because the problem is scaling, and the way I explain climate change is imagine a snowball coming down a mountain. We’re gonna get hit by that snowball no matter what.

It could be just a little snowflake, right? That hits us. The more we wait to have meaningful action, it’s gonna become an avalanche. We’re gonna get hit no matter what we, we do all we can determine is how hard do we get hit.

Eduardo: Number four, who do you think we need to have in the podcast?[00:50:00]

Walid: You gotta have Ralph Chami. He’s a great speaker and he’s the one who kicked this initiative off.

Eduardo: Uh,

Number five, Do you think we’ll

make it?

Walid: What, as, as your podcast or as as, as, as humans?

Eduardo: As humans in this big mess we have created for ourselves.

Walid: The one thing that we humans are excellent at is survival. So we will survive, but I’m afraid it’s gonna be at, at a very high cost unfortunately.

Eduardo: well thank you so much for, for being with us today. Uh, Walid, amazing work at Rebalance Earth and…

Walid: thank you.

Eduardo: I really look forward to supporting you in any way we can.

Walid: Excellent. It was a pleasure being on your show. Thank you so much. I’m so used to saying the other one because I run my own podcast. Pleasure having you on my show. But no, thank you so much for inviting me on this show and giving me the opportunity to spread the word of Rebalance Eduardo. I really appreciate it.