Connecting Tree Funders to Rural Planters Worldwide



Treejer, Iran (Islamic Republic of) Treejer is an open protocol that connects
tree funders to rural planters worldwide. The project is experimenting with
cutting-edge concepts such as decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens
(NFTs) and smart contracts to unlock new opportunities in climate finance and
rural development.

Treejer, Iran (Islamic Republic of)

Treejer is an open
protocol that connects tree funders to rural planters worldwide. The project is
experimenting with cutting-edge concepts such as decentralized finance (DeFi),
non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and smart contracts to unlock new opportunities in
climate finance and rural development.

Lack of transparency in financing conservation projects is a
big challenge, specially for projects located in the less developed parts of
our planet. We usually donate and forget. And we hope that someone will use the
money for good. Another challenge is that we focus on the number of new trees
that end up in the ground, not on planting the right trees in the right places
or taking care of them after planting to ensure they survive. Governments and organizations have
long suffered from low survival rates of trees in restoration projects and are
looking for new ways to mitigate it. 

In addition, it's hard to combine programs towards the
financial inclusion of unbanked communities and align them with climate goals.
In fact, that's where our environmental actions have potentially the highest
social impact as well.

And last but not least, we've noticed the lack of proper
incentives for people and organizations to fund such impact projects. There
should be a diverse set of financial and non-financial incentives for them to
fund forests. Some funders want to own the credit of their action and showcase
it to the public, and some others prefer to look at it as an impact investment
opportunity with tangible ROI. At Treejer, we're building open tools to
address such challenges.

In simple words, Treejer Protocol acts as a transparent
bridge. Individuals and organizations are encouraged to fund trees with it and
local communities are paid to plant and maintain them as they grow. 

IMPACT

Treejer creates new job opportunities for local communities
and helps build a better future for our children by tackling Climate Change,
one of the most pressing issues of our time. Our approach in reforestation and
afforestation is sustainable, inclusive and community-based. We are exploring
new ways to maximize impact and transparency.

The protocol uses blockchain-based smart contracts to
receive funding for trees and redistribute it to planters and other
stakeholders in a transparent way. Using Treejer is free for both planters and
funders, however, it charges a commission per tree sale to enable a more
sustainable development with high social impact:

Rural Development Fund: A pool that distributes recurring
micro-loans to participating communities for other sustainable development
activities such as children education and local entrepreneurship

Tree Rescue Fund: A pool that acts as an insurance to plant
new trees when wildfires or other natural disasters hit the sites

Tree Research Fund: A pool that sponsors scientific
researches required for developing Treejer, such as impact analyses, economic
modelling and finding allometric equations of tree species to estimate their
absorbed carbon

Protocol Development Fund: A pool that supports open-source
development and expansion of Treejer Protocol

The team has conducted 3 pilots in simulated off-chain
environments to prototype NFT-like story-telling opportunities for local
communities. In the initial program, 3 Iranian communities in 3 different
villages were funded to plant 1000 traceable trees in Zagros forests. These
collectible trees were distributed in two forms: digital TreeCard and physical
TreeBox. They both conveyed the story of trees in addition to a QR code that
let users locate them online.

After a year-long development, prototyping and optimization
phase, Treejer has expanded to 10 new countries and onboarded locals to test
with another 10,000 trees globally before increasing tree supply caps. These
first 10,000 unique trees are part of a collection called GENESIS and will be
distributed in a few weeks after Treejer’s public beta goes live on Polygon, a
sidechain of Ethereum blockchain with minimized environmental impact.

The same local communities from LatAm, Middle East and
Africa have collectively pledged to supply hundreds of thousands of trees to
Treejer after tree supply caps are increased. Furthermore, they’ll be the first
communities to access our rural development fund and get zero-interest micro
loans to accelerate sustainable development in their regions. The following
images show a local community that is planting trees with Treejer in Bolivia.

HOW IT STARTED

A few years ago, wildfires raged in the Amazon and Africa.
Like many others, I wanted to help, but I couldn't, first, because I was in
Iran and for some reason Iranians were not allowed to have international
payments even if it's for such good causes. Second, I realized that even if I
could have donated, I couldn't ensure the money would go to the affected
communities. Most of the fundraisers were located in other developed countries
and claimed to be connected with locals. However, they provided low
transparency on fund usage and measurement of their impact.

At one point, that small obsession sparked a much bigger
idea of building something for local planters around the world to connect them
with donors and investors directly. Very soon, I noticed that I'm sharing this
small dream with some great minds like Amir, Ali and Bahareh, my friends and
teammates from previous impact projects. We were surprised by how fast some
other like-minded contributors joined us globally. We started the idea of
"planters without borders", designed the current form of Treejer
Protocol and started prototyping to learn about the needs of our
users. The project is now a bit different from its inception idea but it
still shares the original values of decentralization, transparency and
borderless approach in empowering local communities to tackle climate change.

Treejer is embracing a multi-stakeholder approach in climate
innovation and has adopted a progressive decentralization strategy to engage
communities at the highest levels of decision-making. We're trying to maximize
cooperation and minimize competition by redesigning incentives, even for
ourselves. In fact, Treejer has open and permission-less integration
capabilities for everyone. This means that, on one side, existing businesses
can freely integrate with Treejer to create a greener version of their product.
For instance, they can plant trees per product sale and give customers the same
traceable trees as a gift, or let them plant it themselves on the checkout
page, with a simple integration. And on the other side, forest conservation
projects can use Treejer as their infrastructure layer to manage forest,
funding and communication with local communities. 

BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY

Blockchain has helped us experiment with cutting-edge
concepts such as decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and
smart contracts to unlock new opportunities in climate finance and rural
development.

DeFi and smart contracts enable a transparent approach in
forest finance that can benefit tree planters even in unbanked areas of our
planet. Unlike many projects that focus on only planting trees, Treejer uses
smart contracts and other incentive design tools to shift the focus to
sustaining trees after plantation. The same tools help users create a
hyper-liquid and globally accessible carbon market and source it with the
carbon absorbed by Treejer trees.

In addition, NFTs bring unprecedented story-telling
opportunities for rural communities and help funders claim credits for their
impact. We believe NFTs are capable of changing the way we pay for not only art
but also public goods. NFTs are similar to collectible assets and we're adding
this "collectible" attribute to each single tree in Treejer. Now
funders can own a digital representation of every tree they fund as a NFT. It
provides them with some additional benefits both from Treejer and other
platforms interested in rewarding them.

ON BEING OPEN-SOURCE 

Climate Change is no joke and we're running out of time.
Open-source innovation can boost our impact worldwide. And it comes with other
perks as well: transparency, security and freedom. Who doesn't like that?

We wanted to build Treejer in such a way that it could be
easily combined, modified and integrated, according to the needs of our users.
In addition, open-source may create a community of like-minded contributors who
take the ownership of this project besides us. We love that! We love to see other
projects building on top of our technologies. And we love to accelerate
innovation in climate action because we know it’s already getting too late.
Unfortunately, many businesses underestimate the risk of isolated innovation in
this area. We’ve witnessed how fast open-source boosted DeFi in a few months.
It can be applied to other industries as well if incentives are well designed.

TEAM AND DIVERSITY

Today our core contributors and team members are located in
6 countries. Our distributed team works from Iran, Peru, Turkey, Canada,
Portugal and India. We're product designers, developers, Earth scientists and
community builders with shared dreams. Most of our global team members are
highly-skilled migrants and I'm super proud of them. We want to build a better
future for everyone regardless of their race, age, gender and thoughts.

WAY AHEAD 

This investment will leverage our impact in many ways. We
plan to use the funds to support further development of Treejer Protocol in the
next 12 months and create an open community around it. With the support of
UNICEF Innovation Fund, we will design, develop and test new features that
expand the capabilities of our product. 

UNICEF's network and expert knowledge in rural development
will help us run use-cases in new regions. Through this partnership we’ll
develop a use-case of Treejer Protocol for local communities of Iran and other
Persian-speaking countries. We’re looking forward to sharing our learnings
with other portfolio projects and making partnerships to have a bigger impact
on the lives of our children and young people.

Source: unicefinnovationfund.org 

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