Metaverse Sustainability: Value-Based ESG + 10 Tips to Reduce Your Impact

Businesses, governments, NGOs, and other environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investors must consider how to address the impacts of rapidly emerging new technologies such as AR, VR, MR, Blockchain, NFTs, and Web3 as the economy transitions into the metaverse in order to provide greater support to businesses and the metaverse community of all sizes in their transition to net zero.?

The global environmental agenda's social-ecological challenges for example climate change, sustainable development, and biodiversity conservation play an important role in this transition. Key policy-driven agendas include the Paris Climate Agreement, the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the European Green Deal Circular Economy Action Plan, and China's 5-Year Circular Economy Plan. According to a recent report from the Global Sustainable Investment Alliance, sustainable investments total $35.3 trillion, or more than a third of all assets in five of the world's largest markets.

On May 20, 2022, the World Economic Forum (WEF) meet in Davos, Switzerland, to discuss economic trends and global risk. The most important risk/opportunity discussed in Davos remains the climate dialogue. Global leaders have expanded the First Movers Coalition, a program designed to scale up climate mitigation and adaptation investments. The metaverse was clearly one of the stars at Davos, where collaboration between the public and private sectors is still a hot topic. According to Morgan Stanley, it is expected that at least $50 billion will be invested in the metaverse space just by VCs in 2022, not to mention an additional estimated $8 trillion addressable market for the metaverse economy in less than two decades, and if all luxury brands join the race, we could be looking at $56 billion by 2030 for luxury goods.

For global leaders, the climate dialogue is clearly the most important risk/opportunity between public and private sector investment. If the creator economy focuses on value-based ESG and sustainability, it can attract significant metaverse investment, increase market share, and thrive exponentially while transitioning to and achieving Net Zero.

Organizations must pay close attention to how their operations affect the environment, people all over the world, and changing regulations. Many issues in the world, as we all know, are interconnected and should thus be addressed concurrently in order to obtain a holistic approach to developing a way for organizations to give back to society while also generating revenue.

While it may seem difficult to address these concerns, let's discuss and provide some practical tips and common sense approaches for making the metaverse sustainable and creating the conditions for a healthy and diverse metaverse society. In other words, what are the benefits and advantages for companies that prioritize ESG and sustainability in their metaverse operations? And what actions can we make right now that will add up over time?

Traditional ESG scores and ranking methods are widely used by organizations and startups; however, another emerging strategy is gaining traction: Value-Based ESG - a model that not only works well for an organization's own self-interests but also for the community. Value-Based ESG provides insight and takes into account both internal and external factors (Scopes 1, 2, and 3) such as environmental, social, and governance issues, but its primary focus is on directly correlating each ESG factor and quantifying its monetary value and ROI.

The ability of value-based ESG to demonstrate ROI that can be directly correlated to an organization's P&L statement is a powerful motivator to make ESG and sustainability an internal part of their operations and, more importantly, to maintain their commitment to transition to and achieve Net Zero rather than just an afterthought. ~ Dean Peterson

What is the significance of the Value-Based ESG approach?

Given that Value-Based ESG provides many more practical benefits and advantages for the success of the organization and the metaverse ecosystem, including:

1. Organizations with a compelling metaverse value-based ESG proposition and purpose can enter new markets and expand in existing ones.
2. Building and collaborating with the community on ESG factors becomes easier with verifiable results, increasing community confidence, lowering costs, and gaining support for the success of the next project.
3. Developing a genuinely sustainable cost approach to clean energy consumption and waste disposal.
4. Companies with a stronger ESG purpose and external-value proposition can achieve greater strategic and innovative freedom and buy-in.
5. A strong ESG purpose that is financially?accountable and verifiable attracts and retains quality employees while increasing employee motivation and satisfaction. It also has a positive correlation with shareholder returns.
6. Value-based ESG strength assists companies in reducing their risk of adverse government action and gaining government support.
7. Improved asset management over time and allocating capital to more promising and sustainable opportunities help organizations avoid stranded investments that may not pay off in the long run due to long-term environmental issues.
8. Achieving company-wide balance in ESG processes, visibility, systems, and culture, with a clear ESG ROI linked to departmental KPIs.
9. Investors can act on the resulting insight by purchasing stock in companies or startups that make wise investments in value-based ESG and risk mitigation, as reflected in their Profit and Loss (P&L) statement.
10. Value-based ESG can be tracked and quantified in monetary terms for all parties involved, including upstream suppliers and downstream users of the product or service. This encourages organizations to develop, implement and maintain an ESG strategy with the goal and purpose of achieving true sustainability.

As new metaverse sustainability technology, systems, and processes emerge, here are ten metaverse sustainable tips to help you reduce your impact today and improve your company's bottom line:

1. Metaverse technology infrastructure (scalability and reliability)?

Shifting from on-premises infrastructure to a cloud computing service provider that uses 100% renewable energy and supports the metaverse ecosystem infrastructure.

Metaverse companies that switch to Amazon Sumerian managed services, for example, by using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon GameLift, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Cloudfront, and AWS Control Tower, can help reduce carbon emissions by 88% because their data centres can offer environmental economies of scale. Companies use 77% fewer servers, 84% less power, and a 28 percent cleaner mix of solar and wind power. AWS is also working on a number of initiatives to use less potable (drinking) water to cool their data centres.

2. Scaling voluntary carbon offsetting

Carbon credits that have been tokenized can be used to power carbon offsetting across the metaverse, NFT marketplaces, crypto markets, and Web3. There are two prominent leaders:

1) MintZero NFT is the simplest way for small and fast-growing businesses to offset their carbon footprint. MintZero, for example, provides a no-hassle approach; there are no forms to fill out or audits to complete, and there are no hidden costs or fees. Simply choose the MintZero NFT that best suits your needs, and you will be carbon neutral for the next ten years. Owners of MintZero NFTs will have achieved verification to one of the leading carbon credit standards, such as Verra or Gold Standard.

2) Flowcarbon , for example, will use smart contracts to automatically retire carbon credits as transactions occur. Carbon credits can be purchased by buyers across the NFT marketplace, crypto, and Web3, and NFT creators can dedicate a percentage of the fee from each sale to them. The smart contract will automatically retire Flowcarbon's token upon purchase, triggering the retirement of the associated carbon credits.

3. Greener manufacturing and circular economy

Increase the use of recycled materials in the packaging and manufacture of metaverse wearable products such as Mixed Reality (MR) Smart Glasses, VR headsets, Smart Lenses, Haptic Gloves, Scanning Sensors, and Tracking Systems. Offer proper End-of-Service product disposal while also taking advantage of the many high-quality components and materials. You can also upgrade your internal business infrastructure and technology operations by mandating new product purchases are made from recycled materials.

4. Choosing the right development engine for metaverse hybrid reality

Unity (Graphic quality is lower than Unreal) and Unreal Engine (Realistic graphics quality) are the two best tools for development in the metaverse, and both began as game development engines. Choosing the right development engine to build your AR, VR, or MR environment can help reduce carbon emissions by requiring less computing power to render and can extend battery life on mobile and wearable devices, depending on the use case and target audience of your metaverse project. In comparison to Unreal, for example, Unity allows you to create simple mixed reality applications quickly and easily.

5. Use Proof of Stake rather than Proof of Work whenever possible

In contrast to a Proof of Work-based consensus system such as Ethereum or Bitcoin, a Proof of Stake network such as Tezos does not rely on the cost of the electricity it consumes to thwart potential attackers. Instead, direct economic incentives are used as a carrot or a stick, with stakeholders posting bonds that can be seized if they go astray.

6. Select more sustainable alternatives to high gas-fee NFT trading

Polygon (MATIC) has grown in popularity in recent years on platforms such as OpenSea due to an increase in the number of developers and users. The platform offers all of the benefits of Ethereum (ETH), but with greater scalability and lower gas fees, making it an excellent Ethereum (ETH) replacement.

7. Emission and noise pollution reduction through virtual collaboration

People from all over the world can now work together thanks to the various methods of online/virtual collaboration. This means that organizations can get more done and produce more products and services in less time. Transportation emissions, noise pollution for those who live near commercial properties, office utility costs, and shipping costs are reduced, as are physical transportation and fuel. While not all meetings can be held remotely, it is critical to use online collaboration tools when they are available.

8. Clearly define sustainable development goals and commitments

The metaverse is still in its infancy in terms of technology; it will most likely take years to reach a level of maturity where we can see a global impact. Spend some time outlining your commitments. Short-term goals outline how organizations will reduce emissions over the next 5-10 years, whereas long-term targets outline the level of emission reductions required for organizations to achieve net-zero emissions.

9. Form Long-term sustaining partnerships

Sustainability is a hot-button issue these days. Most companies have developed their positions on metaverse sustainability and are sticking to them. The problem is that most companies have been focusing on their own "dots" and not so much on helping the overall metaverse ecosystem sustainability effort. What it takes is cooperation between stakeholders such as customers, industry peers, and partners. One company can't do it all. Business leaders need to get together and have synergistic relationships. When that happens, the world will be a much better place.

10. Employees are your company’s most valuable asset for sustainable innovation

To build a sustainable and successful organization, companies can take advantage of the commitment and intellect of their employees by offering them green initiatives that encourage them to get involved, share their insights, and push fresh ideas and innovations for how to incorporate greener initiatives and practices into everyday operations. Going sustainable is far more than just a trend or a way to even impress metaverse customers - it's about being congruent with your internal culture as well as reaching external ones.

What are your thoughts on the subject? ?? Let me know what you think! Please connect with me on LinkedIn or?email me .

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