Cormac
October 1, 2024
Hello, and welcome! We’re excited to tell you about HabitatDAO.
We started HabitatDAO to help people who care about the environment to take matters into their own hands and do something meaningful for the places they care about.
HabitatDAO’s mission is to turn environmental data into a public good owned by the global community, accessible to and actionable by all. Our belief is that by empowering people to contribute to hyper-local environmental initiatives where they live, we give people a tangible way to be part of the climate solution.
We started HabitatDAO because we believe:
So what exactly are environmental public goods and why do they matter? Well, let’s first talk about public goods. Public goods are resources or services that are available to all citizens, and they have a couple of very important characteristics. First, they should be available to all i.e., it should be hard to stop any individual from getting access to the resource. Second, one person’s use of the resource shouldn’t reduce its availability to others. Environmental public goods are critical things like access to clean air, healthy drinking water, low flood risk, and ample shade. Unfortunately, access to these resources is not evenly distributed, and the underlying reasons for that need to be understood before they can be addressed.
Through the use of emerging environmental technology and decentralized, community-driven organizing, HabitatDAO plans to deliver a new type of public good in the form of open and accessible environmental data. The goal is to collect sensor data during the course of work (think air, soil, and water quality), and make it available to the Habitat community and beyond. By doing this work, we aim to enhance the availability of an increasingly important type of information, and lower the barrier for anyone to get involved with monitoring and sharing the state of the environment. We believe this is the first step in solving the injustices that prevent environmental public goods being enjoyed by all.
While we’re starting HabitatDAO with some concrete ideas about how we’ll get started i.e., specific ideas for environmental monitoring and data sharing initiatives in specific locations that we’re familiar with, our big hope is that it evolves to a point beyond where we’re currently focused, to a place where people we don’t know yet are doing things we hadn’t imagined!
Our primary goal is to demonstrate that communities can cooperate in a decentralized manner to coordinate collection, ownership, and dissemination of crucial environmental information. In the course of doing that work, we hope that people will take on local initiatives that make sense to them, their wider community, and the environmental conditions they are concerned or curious about.
Here’s some of the types of things that we hope will happen under the HabitatDAO umbrella:
Environmental Issue
Potential Local Initiative
Local Climate Action
Planting trees in deforested areas to absorb CO2, or tracking weather events to develop early flood warning systems.
Biodiversity Conversation
Monitoring populations of endangered plants and animals and taking steps to ensure habitat restoration.
Water Management
Real-time monitoring of water bodies for pollutants, pH levels, and biodiversity to help protect drinking water sources. Data on water usage can also help create a more efficient water usage culture.
Food Security
Understanding local climate patterns and soil health can be used to grow more resilient crops and help secure food supplies in areas vulnerable to climate change.
Energy Efficiency
Communities could monitor energy usage and work together to advocate for deployment of renewable energy sources to match their consumption patterns.
Circular Economy
By tracking waste generation and disposal, communities can highlight how sustainably they are living, and identify new opportunities for upcycling.
Pollution Reduction
Air and soil quality monitoring can help reduce pollution from industrial sources, traffic, and agriculture by first highlighting the problem and equipping the community to advocate for remediation.
Urban Planning
By better understanding how their environment behaves in terms of things like air quality, flooding, and heat, communities are well positioned to advocate for green spaces and green infrastructure that improve quality of life and reduce environmental impacts.
Civic Engagement
By having access to local environment data, citizens are more informed and empowered to play a more active role in society.
Ecotourism
By sharing accessible information about wildlife populations, biodiversity, and all-round environmental health, it is more likely that sustainable tourism practices can be developed.
Public Health
Monitoring air pollution levels is a foundational step in starting initiatives that lead to improved air quality, which can reduce respiratory illness and overall healthcare costs for the area. The same applies to noise pollution monitoring, which can be used to reduce noise and thereby improve mental health.
Access To Nature
By having clear data on how public land is used from area to area, communities can ensure equitable access to green spaces and enjoy all of the mental and physical benefits that come from greater interaction with nature.
Global Collaboration
As communities around the world collect and share data, we start to create a global repository of environmental knowledge. Our big hope is to foster international collaboration and have communities learn from each other's successes so that climate issues can be mitigated as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Community members will carry out projects that produce valuable real-world environmental findings, and share these hyper-local findings to drive real change in their neighborhoods and beyond. For example, by recording air quality information about communities that are too hot, we can start to advocate for more tree cover. We’ll be starting with projects that our early DAO members are passionate about and that we have experience with.
Over time, we expect that a valuable cache of environmental data will be collected and owned by the DAO, as opposed to being a centralized entity whose goals are not fully aligned with the citizens. The data from these projects will be owned by the HabitatDAO community, and we hope that seeing success in one area will inspire future members to join and carry out similar projects where they live.
We are deeply grateful to our generous grant sponsor, The Solana Foundation, for their invaluable support, which is helping us bring this project to life and explore new approaches to environmental engagement that we hope will make a lasting impact.
© 2024 HabitatDAO