Hack4Climate in Bonn

by Daniel Pollithy — on  ,  , 

DLT against climate change

In November 2017 I participated at a hackathon in Bonn called “Hack4Climate”. Actually on a boat which was anchored five minutes from the city center in the river Rhine.

A cool location to host an event. It was part of the UN world climate conference and the purpose was to hack on ideas regarding DLT and climate change.

Inspiration

The applications for this event were quite strict and I was really happy to be invited. The event was truely international which was inspiring. I talked to students from Stanford, crypto experts from Russia, employees of the MIT and the ETH, there was a group of students from the TUM, my team mates where from Delhi and London.

Corporations sent people to give talks (Microsoft, Consensys, innogy, DB, SBB…) as well as institutes (Max-Planck) and the two “celebrities” Fabian Vogelsteller (Ethereum Foundation) and Dominik Schiener (Iota Foundation) were talking and part of the jury.

The hacking

Of this full week in Bonn we only had 24 hours to actually build something. Our project was called waterfriendliness index, which was an approach on how to measure, score and incentivice responsible use of water.

The most interesting winner was the team called gainforest.org. They used satelite data to build a statistical model for endangered forests of the earth. It could predict which regions were shrinking in the future. They proposed that consumers could invest their money into these regions to protect the forest. (First I thought that giving people money so they leave their forest untouched is a bad idea… but it looks like it is one of the only tools that is proven to work in more than 50% of the cases and exactly what the United Nations are doing these days. Somebody was even telling me that employees of the UN are sent with helicopters to distant regions to pay the people in cash because they have neither a street nor digital money)