Preserving Nature's Ledger: Blockchains in Biodiversity Conservation

TL;DR

This paper investigates how blockchain technology can enhance biodiversity conservation by providing a transparent, immutable, and decentralized digital ledger to monitor and protect ecological assets, fostering trust and economic benefits.

Contribution

It introduces a grounded framework detailing essential blockchain features for supporting digital resilience in biodiversity conservation efforts.

Findings

Blockchain enables transparent environmental asset tracking

Framework identifies key blockchain features for ecological data management

Supports economic incentives for conservation stakeholders

Abstract

In the contemporary era, biodiversity conservation emerges as a paramount challenge, necessitating innovative approaches to monitoring, preserving, and enhancing the natural world. This paper explores the integration of blockchain technology in biodiversity conservation, offering a novel perspective on how digital resilience can be built within ecological contexts. Blockchain, with its decentralized and immutable ledger and tokenization affordances, presents a groundbreaking solution for the accurate monitoring and tracking of environmental assets, thereby addressing the critical need for transparency and trust in conservation efforts. Unlike previous more theoretical approaches, by addressing the research question of how blockchain supports digital resilience in biodiversity conservation, this study presents a grounded framework that justifies which blockchain features are essential to decipher specific data contribution and data leveraging processes in an effort to protect our planet's biodiversity, while boosting potential economic benefits for all actors involved, from local farmers, to hardware vendors and artificial intelligence experts, to investors and regular users, volunteers and donors.