Imagine you digitally tracked every tree on earth, and thus prevented deforestation? China and Spain are pulling together the technology
Tree sculptures seen in Nanning, China's Guangxi province (WSJ)
We have been long been exploring, by means of the work of Vinay Gupta, how the digital ledger system known as “blockchain” could help us with a zero-carbon world - by tagging objects and products, and relating them to the material flows they are part of.
This would compel more robust and repairable design and attack planned obsolescence, putting a prohibition on (discardable) objects that measurably increase our carbon impact (see Vinay’s thoughts here and here).
This is an internet which is different from the open network we know from the 80s and 90s. Facing a moment of ecological urgency, it’s much more surveillant and monitoring - asking the question, what kind of infrastructure do we need that can quickly move us beyond a toxic consumerism? It may not be the answer, but blockchain at least addresses the question.
And we should note who is picking up the opportunity. This article from China Dialogue makes a bold attempt to link together three forms of Chinese state innovation - one blockchain, one financial and one legislative -that could, if combined, create “a pathway for China to digitise trade that can curb deforestation”.
The pieces are
The BSN (Blockchain Services Network), the world’s largest blockchain platform, built by the Chinese state and launched in April. Companies must deploy it to do business in China. The platform has eight overseas nodes, including one in Brazil.
Forestry regulation in 2020, prohibiting the use and trading of timber of illegal origin. That regulation provides the legal underpinning for tackling deforestation, by clarifying the liability if companies fail to investigate their supply chain.
The first real-world trial of the digital yuan, China’s new digital currency
The excerpt below explains how they’d fit together:
At the time of logging, a tree would be registered into the BSN database using its GPS coordinates. An intelligent tag would then attach to its journey on a blockchain ledger. Transaction documents such as customs registers would track its subsequent route.
Once it reached customs, the QR code would reveal where the tree was logged, for example on a smartphone screen. The geolocation would then automatically check against a database of prohibited areas. If the log was from such an area, the smart contract would automatically block the order and disbursement of payment using digital yuan.
In other words, the BSN could require that every log traded on the platform would arrive with a digital timber passport. This would be a unique identifier of the log paired with data on its travel route to prove source of origin.
So far so good. But inevitably there are challenges in such a massive project.
Critically, not every tree on the surface of the Earth is labelled with a QR code and GPS coordinates. Therefore, for the time being there are risks of data falsification at the point of entering the log data onto the BSN network and at the time of tree tagging. For any given tree in an illegal area, false GPS coordinates might be entered, having been stolen from another, unregistered location in a legal logging zone.
But science and market-based solutions are moving quickly in this area. Platforms could be combined, such as Forest Watch’s satellite images, the IUCN global tree red list which offers an overview of threatened tree species, and the Global Timber Tracking Network project, building a central database of tree reference data based on DNA. Public agencies and private satellite companies are piling in, monitoring tree cover via earth observation technologies.
Recent results published in Nature show that detail is improving so fast that: “Resolution improvement places the field of terrestrial remote sensing on the threshold of a fundamental leap forward: from focusing on aggregate landscape-scale measurements to having the potential to map the location and canopy size of every tree over large regional or global scales.”
Next year’s Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) summit is an opportunity for China to play a convening role, to connect all these existing efforts, to develop a global tree repository.
Such a product would continuously update, leveraging earth observation technologies and AI in tree species identification and classification. It could combat deforestation, via automated certification and tracing of logs, whether entering China or other countries.
Already, some countries without blockchain infrastructure comparable to the BSN have been trialling the tracing of timber using compatible platforms.
For example, Spain’s Ministry for Forestry recently concluded a proof of concept on timber traceability via its ChainWood consortium, to trace the movement of pine, eucalyptus and chestnuts. Since the BSN is designed to work with other platforms, ChainWood could link data regarding Spanish timber exported to China, for example.
More here. The article goes on to suggest that there could be financial incentives for local loggers to mark these trees accurately - we noted this requirement in our A/UK blog on Fishcoin - and that if the Chinese pulled their model together, jurisdiction like Brazil might adopt it (maybe, perhaps, with new leadership).
As ever, we wonder at the levels of scale here. Global trade on trees would certainly require these huge digital structures to manage them. But in this framework, massive states still have control of the “black boxes” that sift and record all this data.
How could this combination of elements - law, tech and finance - be made appropriate to a bio-region, for example, or some federation of cities that had a common interest in monitoring its resource flows? Also, how can protocols be established whereby these black boxes explain and give an account of themselves to citizens (see the work of Frank Pasquale here)?
And does an infinitely subtle regulation of trade in timber substitute for a regenerative, bio-literate relationship to trees themselves (see posts here)?