Speaking For Tech Sustainability: Singapore Blockchain Fest 2023

Singapore recently celebrated Blockchain Fest 2023. Across the road at?PALO IT ?we held an impromptu Web3Next evening event with?Enjinstarter ?for tech enthusiasts to continue the conversation.

Alongside my talented design colleague Weiwei Li, I was asked to join the panel hosted by Yudesh Soobrayan and speak for Sustainability. I’m super proud to work for an organisation that takes the lead in bringing such vital conversations to the table. My goal was to balance innovation with fundamental awareness around societies evolution with sustainability and tech4good.

In an effort to improve my own clarity and presenting around this subject I took the time to reflect on the conversation, to expand on the subject and share thoughts more widely.

“Perhaps we will start more broadly, what does Sustainability mean to you, and what are some of the prominent issues?”

Sustainability is clearly a BIG subject with many dimensions we are all on a journey with. I can start by sharing one way I have come to look at the subject…

If we pause and unpack the word ‘sustainability’, we can ask ourselves what is it that we are trying to be?able?to?sustain? More and more we face into the reality, the hard truth, that we are not able to sustain our current and total socio-economic systems. Our current way of being.

The planet will survive, nature always does. This is a crisis for sustaining humanity as we know it.?The key questions are how far can we keep going, and to what degree will be the consequences?

It is now clearer we cannot progress with a siloed mindset, depleting our resources and spoiling the environment that sustains us. It is the cost of this mis-alignment that is starting to pinch/suffocate us more and more.

If we look at the most prominent sustainability issues that we face today, then of course?1.5 degrees (above pre industrial temperatures) , carbon and the climate crisis is at the forefront. It’s a key driver. However, equally important is?biodiversity loss ?and habitat destruction,?ocean acidification and fresh water supply, and plastic/pollution and lack of circularity. Coupled with these are the many social inequalities, e.g. lack of equity and wellbeing in the system.

If we follow the science we now have the understanding of?9?planetary boundaries ?(where climate change is just one), and?16 planetary tipping elements ?as critical risks to the overall planet as a system. We learn more and more how critically all of these elements are inter-connected, the consequences of which could at least severely destabilise us as a species.

The challenge is we still consider ourselves abstract from it. We say ‘the’ environment, rather than ‘our’ environment. We view ‘human systems’, ‘natural systems’’ and “business systems” as if they are separate, and for too long we have resisted the mindset to accept there is simply one ‘living system ’ and we (and our business and technology) are part of it.

The environment conversation inevitably leads us back to fossil fuels which have actually done us a whole load of good (dare I say it!). In a relatively short period of time (100–200 years) fossil fuels have helped ignite and empower?huge socio-economic growth ?(quality of life, health, life expectancy, social stability) and the technological revolution which has bought many benefits, luxuries and conveniences that many of us have come to enjoy (unfortunately not all of us — in tech 1/3 of the population nearly?3 Billion people still do not have access to the internet ).

Fossil fuels have also clearly bought other challenges.

It took our planet over 200,000 years to get to 1-billion people. In the last 200 years we have now reached 8 billion in population (10 billion by 2050). Huge growth, and with that growth unfortunately we have disembarked from the symbiotic relationships with nature, and embodied a ‘growth at all costs’ mindset. With increased wealth we might assume there is more to go around, yet the wealth gap widens. Whether it is GDP, profit, production, productivity, consumerism, inequality, pollution and waste, we are consuming more than the planet can restore sustainably. We have scaled an unsustainable system. We have built accountancy systems based on financial cost, and turned a blind eye to all of the other costs included in ‘our’ system.

Co2 is in fact the largest waste product we put out into the world, by weight, despite it being an invisible gaseous substance —?37 Billion metric Tonnes a year . Unlike other gasses such as water vapor that also contribute to a warming of our planet by trapping heat like a blanket, 50% of co2 takes a hundred+ years to dissipate and the other 50% takes over a thousand years. Therefore, around half the carbon we are pumping into our atmosphere today will still be around in 3023, a thousand years from today. Scary.

Although death is not the only negative consequence the?WHO estimates 7 million people die prematurely a year ?from all sources of air pollution.

What can we conclude from this??Whether its carbon, air-toxins, plastic, chemicals, fresh-water, rare earths in digital devices or the lack of recycling, we have an issue with pollution. Ultimately this is a waste management issue (take-make-waste).

For all of the good/value that this progression has bought us (tech very much included), our systemic ‘growth at all cost’ mindset has failed to account for a cost that this all creates somewhere else in the system. And we thought we were an intelligent economy with our brightest minds leading and scaling businesses driven by accountancy, yet half of our bloomin balance sheet has been missing!

And to the crux of it, the killer question we have not wanted to face into… who is going to pick up the bill? Who is going to Pay?

“What does this mean for Sustainable IT and highly innovative tech, Web3 and Blockchain?”

When it comes to IT and #tech4good I have come to understood Sustainable IT under two broad themes:

1. Sustainability by IT — that is how tech can be used to better improve and accelerate the sustainability agenda

2. Sustainability of IT — that is how can IT be improved to be more sustainable itself

The latter is really important. There is often a fallacy that IT is the sustainability superhero, when in reality it is often also the villain.

This is embodied in our language when we speak of working ‘virtual’ rather than ‘physical’, working ‘online’, in ‘the cloud’, or working in the ‘metaverse’. It leaves an impression it is in absence of any material reality. The truth is all of this has a cost whether it is the energy, Co2, natural resources or social impact across the supply chain. It is in the hardware, in the transmitting of data, in the data centres, in the HUGE video streaming uptake, in the physical infrastructure and networks. In the 34 BILLION digital devices we have today, and in the huge extraction and refinement of rare minerals that takes place at point of production - often with quite horrific social conditions for local communities where commercial value is offset against health-care, child/forced labour, and prioritising fresh-water for our tech over the agriculture and subsistence of local communities.

These costs are embedded in each stage of the supply chain from extraction/refinement, production and manufacturing, usage, through to end of life and the?60% of E-waste that gets pushed through illegal channels , only?17% of digital devices reach recycling ?and a much smaller % that can actually be recycled.

This awareness is lacking, yet foundational. Which is why I have become a Climate Fresk and Digital Collage facilitator, alongside coaching Sustainability transformation to support this radical update of our operating system.

“So what considerations can we take forward for Blockchain and new emerging tech?”

Well when it comes to BlockChain the same two lenses apply.

Lens 1. How can we leverage Web3, blockchain, AI etc to help improve or accelerate a shift to a sustainable future?

For something like Web3 there are interesting areas of utility, which all lend themselves very well to the sustainability agenda. For example WEF positions?sustainability as a ‘co-ordination problem’ . Co-ordination of people, systems, finance, resources, and when we can better de-shackle ourselves from traditional centralised power-structures, and better visualise, understand and co-ordinate across supply/value chains and across these otherwise complex systems it aspires hope in improved trust, governance and security. All key sustainability pillars.

Lens 2. How can we improve understanding to better design and implement tech solutions, that limit the costs that IT can have to society?

After all the EU Reminds us that around?80% of environmental issues are built in at the design phase . Whilst the numbers might vary slightly this picture is true for the design of product, experience, society, platforms, future cities, and social-economic systems.

For both points, is technology an enabler? Where do we get the balance right between our tendency to build over solve, to invent over innovate, to push (function) rather than pull (needs), to add = more over less = better, and our tendency for individual efficiency over collective sufficiency.

And for those that are still keen to hear about the tech, 7 sustainability BlockChain use-case examples…

• UN World Food Program (WFP)?Building Blocks ?and?case example
• Cool Singapore project — log your scuba dives and contribute to marine biology —?150bar.com ?by Keith Teo
• Toucan trustless decentralised token ?carbon credits for offsetting
• High end Fashion? for boosting second hand market
• Beyond the grid,?energy solutions for remote communities? funding universal basic income
• Leading car manufacturers joined forces with the?Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative (MOBI) ?secondary markets and car sharing
• IBM’s? blockchain-based?Food Trust ?to keep track of its goods along every step of the supply chain (used by Walmart, Nestle, carrefour etc)

Adapting Einstein’s old adage seems pertinent:

‘If I had an hour to solve a (sustainability) problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about the solution (Blockchain).

I hope you found something of interest.

Thanks For Reading,

Paul