Every minute, the equivalent of 30 football fields worth of forests are cleared, amounting to an annual toll of close to nine million hectares. With entire ecosystems hanging in the balance during an unprecedented time of climate change, corporations that embrace efforts to restock forests need assurances with transparency to preserve revenue and cultivate biodiversity.
EOS VC grant recipient EcoMatcher, a Certified B Corporation, helps businesses tackle climate change and sustainability to offset their carbon footprint with reforestation efforts tracked on EOSIO via EcoMatcher’s “TreeChain.”
EcoMatcher Founder and CEO Bas Fransen brings management experience from executive roles at Philips, IBM, and ASML. After a long corporate career and a number of startups, he started EcoMatcher with the objective of enabling businesses to make a positive environmental impact amid an era of the climate crisis.
As Bas explains, EcoMatcher has quite lofty goals, “to plant a billion trees by 2023.” To maximize transparency and attract the large client base that can make this happen, EcoMatcher launched TreeChain, a private blockchain built on EOSIO that contains detailed records of every tree the company plants. EOSIO’s configurability made it an ideal candidate as a blockchain platform for EcoMatcher’s purposes.
EcoMatcher serves a wide range of corporate clients in partnership with carefully vetted tree-planting organizations located across the globe. Customers can access granular details on their sponsored trees and forests, including CO2 data, satellite tracking, photographs, and an online suite of digital gifting tools, available via the web or a mobile iOS and Android application.
Tree Planting Transparency on EOSIO with TreeChain
Bas believes that companies with an interest in sustainability will begin to adopt tree planting on a massive scale when issues such as transparency are addressed. “What has been missing until now is transparency in tree planting. By addressing this, we know every tree that is planted, every location, when it was planted, the species, who the farmer is, and much more.”
TreeChain provides corporate clients extra assurance by individually tracking every tree with EOSIO blockchain-backed records. Whenever a tree is planted it is also stored on TreeChain. As the tree is transferred from one account to another, the immutable transaction history is transparently preserved. EcoMatcher also runs a clean operation by offsetting TreeChain’s carbon footprint with trees.
“For example,” Bas explains, “if a company were to gift a tree to somebody else, we can show that privately on our blockchain so that all of the data of every tree is now available to the end-user on TreeChain.”
Although it only launched in November 2020, TreeChain is already producing the results EcoMatcher is looking for. “Now we are being approached by large clients with whom we would love to work with to help them with their climate change goals and corporate social responsibility initiatives. Addressing the climate crisis is a collective effort, and we hope that our blockchain-based digital platform encourages many more companies to join.”
Together with TreeChain, companies like Microsoft, Zuellig Pharma, S&P Global, and many others are making a difference, reducing global carbon footprints, and transforming the way forest ecologies are cultivated and tracked with EOSIO blockchain-based management.
Global Reforestation for Sustainability
In a time where conservation efforts play a critical role in mitigating the effects of climate change, EcoMatcher set its roots in reforestation initiatives.
Bas takes a hands-on approach, traveling onsite to meet with tree farmers and build relationships with organizations who help EcoMatcher track and manage each tree. EcoMatcher works in developing countries where tree planting makes a positive difference.
“We are also helping local communities elevate their lives, by planting fruit trees, for example, that bear fruits in a couple of years, or just by planting trees that improve the soil, which local farmers then can use for growing crops. Those types of things are tremendous benefits.”
EcoMatcher uses algorithms to calculate the carbon sequestration of a tree at any point in time and the expectation over the tree’s lifetime. This allows customers to get both an immediate and long-term sense of the productive effect each tree has on the environment. Tree recipients can use the web and mobile applications to send messages to farmers and interact with the EcoMatcher platform to learn more about tree planting.
With all these pieces of the puzzle in place, EcoMatcher makes it more appealing and convenient for corporate customers to plant entire forests around the world in areas where they will have the most benefit to local communities. After investing in their forests, they can use each individual tree to drive corporate gifting programs, employee incentive rewards, or other strategies.
The Mind That Sprouted EcoMatcher
Bas Fransen
Bas graduated from the Delft University of Technology and served as an officer of the Royal Dutch Navy. He has worked in executive roles at Philips CE, Philips Semiconductors, IBM Technology, and ASML before delving into the world of startups. Bas has three children and lives with his wife in Hong Kong.
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