Proposal: We need to reboot UN-COP as a DAO - to really engage and empower the general public to fix climate change.

Frank Meehan (BraveNewDAO.earth)

Last year, politicians, climate activists, founders, investors, influencers etc all came together for COP26 in Glasgow. The biggest COP yet, with the most high powered attendees. There were many tears shed on camera, many more social media photos and lots of "commitments" and urgings made about targets and reductions. 

However, while the general public, even in the US, are very much in favour of solutions, they are overall disengaged from the climate debate and COP27, especially GenZ who really really care about it. And whatever your opinion is of Greta Thunberg - she is spot on about COP27 climate leaders - and she isn’t alone…there is an increasing general feeling that our climate “leaders” aren’t connected with the general public. 

This post will argue that to really engage the general public and act fast that it's time to completely reboot COP. As the Climate Change Conference DAO. 

No-one in the general public votes or has any say in the UN-COP committees, charter or the proposed solutions. However, while has been a tremendous amount of growing criticism of COP27, there have been few real solutions on how to fix it.

My proposal is that if COP could be restructured as a Decentralized Autonomous Organisation (DAO) where COP’s decision making, targets and accountability are distributed to the general public, in conjunction with the UN and other key climate organisations, then COP can become far more effective, engaged and able to really drive true grassroots change.

Why? Well what has actually happened since Glasgow?

The world simply got worse. The UN recently stated that 2022 was actually a "lost year" with no credible path towards a 1.5º target. Many areas of the world face greater water restrictions, and the CO2 emissions resulting from deforestation in the last 12 months were equivalent to the emissions of the entire European Union plus Japan. Although thankfully with Lula’s win in Brazil, at least the Amazon might be saved - nothing to do with COP though.

Few governments, with the notable exception of Australia and the US, actually enacted meaningful climate legislation. But as the UNEP stated last week - Meeting global climate goals requires a rapid transformation of societies and a very steep ramp up of decarbonization. It’s almost too late to act - and a lot of that is down to our current climate leaders failure to really engage the global population.

COP27 - A great time at Sharm El Sheikh, but what actual actions?

So what will happen at COP27? It's going to be more of the same, except this time the leader at COP26 - the UK Prime Minister - is probably not even attending (and has even banned King Charles from going). We will have more social media photos enjoying the resorts in Egypt, more pledges, a lot more doom and no real solutions. And highly likely we will be back for COP28 after another "lost year".

COP and the UN efforts are admirable - they have really worked hard over the years to get climate change on the global agenda. But while the UN and COP continue to be run as a highly centralized organization with little real power or accountability, the general population are going become more and more disenfranchized from them, especially during what is increasingly looking like a global recession driven by energy/food scarcity and high prices. The general person has no say in COP, no vote on what is being done to stop climate change and no real idea on what is being done.

So why reboot COP as a DAO. 

“DAOs or Decentralised Autonomous Organisations are a Web3 native model of collaboration, challenging the traditional highly centralized model of a corporation or organisation such the UN. DAOs in their simplest form allocate power to members instead of a central point of authority - so that the concerns and votes of the people can be heard. 

Consensys defines a DAO as “governing bodies that oversee the allocation of resources tied to the projects they are associated with and are also tasked with ensuring the long term success of the project they support”. 

A DAO is an excellent structure for rebooting the COP Climate Change Conference for the following reasons:

• DAO’s are transparent and accountable. Because all important proposals and decisions are made “on-chain,” using governance tokens and votes that appear on the permanent blockchain ledger. Decisions are locked, and can’t be watered down. COP 27 is the opposite of transparency, with visitors subject to extensive video surveillence and searches.
• DAO’s work from white-papers and community-led initiatives: providing thought leadership and guidance from scientists, founders and governments - and most importantly - the general public votes on what proceeds, and what targets are set for the organisation.
• DAO's Smart Contracts: the backbone of a DAO, which codify the governance and rules of a DAO from committee members, governance to passing proposals and provide the transparency above.
• DAO Tokens: the core of the DAO paradigm, with a UN-COP DAO, they can be used to incentivize and reward people who contribute, take meaningful action, engage their communities and more. 

With a COP28 DAO for example, the key decisions, compromise and solution sourcing around climate change can move to engaging with the people who are directly being impacted. Imagine if the people most impacted by climate change in Bangladesh, Pacific Islands, Africa etc had a vote and real input into COP. Wouldn’t that be a “game changer”? 

COP would become a series of "committees" or "pods" where  voting by the world community on global and local actions, holding politicians to account leads to better decisions on climate change action.

The concern in this structure is that activists such as Just Stop Oil, while well-meaning, could hijack the DAO and advocate stopping all world trade and business. Equally those opposed to climate change could participate. But this is the beauty of a DAO, each group will have a voice as much as anyone - the DAO members can vote on their proposals - and the world can move forward. Since most polls say that around two-thirds of the US, Europe and Asia are very concerned by climate change, and GenZ in particular, then the votes from the majority would outweigh the more vocal minorities - but at least everyone is represented and have a say. And neither can COP organizers keep protestors corralled away. This is would would be an enormous step forward in engagement. 

I will be writing more about this in later articles, as I expand upon this proposal. In the meantime, anyone reading this who would like to take action and start a climate change conference DAO now to illustrate to the UN what could be achieved - get in touch!

About BraveNewDAO.

At BraveNewDAO.earth we are building a DAO to engage and empower everyone to source, vote and champion solutions to helping humanity survive, and the current version of our earth to thrive - while also building the financial systems and capital to help power those solutions sourced and voted on by the DAO. It’s born out of my long experience investing in the climate, sustainability and web3 sectors - and my strong belief that DeFi can really power the financing of the brave new founders and innovators that are both improving the planet and scaling valuable businesses.