Perhaps you’ve witnessed the naked slopes of Haiti, the slash-and-burn in Guatemala, or the bare charcoal fields in Zambia? For those in need, wood is often the last resource, and when it is gone, it leads to hunger. Unfortunately, growing a tree is not an answer when one is starving now.
Greenstand exists to disrupt this model at scale.
Created to address issues of extreme poverty, Greenstand’s founding hypothesis was simple: money can grow on trees, that is, that planting and growing trees can create viable incomes. When we started, this had never been done before, with one exception.
In Haiti, Huge Locke and Timote Georges, founders of the Smallholder Farmers Alliance, together with Atlanta McIlwraith, pioneered a model that created direct, immediate economic incentives for planting trees. Their model worked by exchanging environmental action for credits, which farmers used to access seeds, tools, training, microloans, and much more. It restored land, unlocked international investment, and most importantly, supported the local population. They called it a “Tree Currency,” and it demonstrated the viability of an environmentally-backed currency’s potential to impact poverty.
Leveraging environmental action to create a localized, regenerative economy is the most powerful nature-based solution model possible - the concept remains at the heart of Greenstand.
The Tree Currency pioneers proved that unlocking localized environmental impact ownership and trade can solve issues of hunger. To scale this model globally requires an ecosystem of tools, data, and technology to unravel the complexity at the nexus of human nature and environmental change, a difficult challenge, yet it is what Greenstand is building.
The Greenstand technology is an inclusive environmental fintech platform. It generates local incomes by facilitating the creation, collection, and trade of “environmental impact action.” Starting with the simple act of growing a tree, the technology enables players to collect image-based, ground-truthed data packages called “captures,” which are analyzed in the cloud to verify and measure environmental impact. This process creates transparent, open data that links individuals to positive environmental change. These “valued” captures are minted into wallets as tokens and traded on an open ledger.
Could this scale to a billion people, alleviate extreme poverty, and address climate change?
We believe so. Although still a prototype and far from perfect, the technology has already generated incomes for thousands of users; it has millions of “tree captures” being converted into tokens, bought, traded, and linked to point-of-sale systems worldwide. To scale from here to a billion users, the model must work flawlessly to pay people on the ground - when it does that, it will truly change the face of poverty and of our planet.
For further reading, see:
- "The Haiti Experiment: Amid the Wreckage of a Country Once Rich Beyond Measure, a Chance to Rebuild,” By Hugh Locke
- academic.oup.com/book/39548/chapter/339410857?
- www.thegrowingdutchman.com/our-work-with-smallholder-farmers-in-haiti-an-in-depth-look/
- www.conservationfinancealliance.org/incubator-cards/2021/2/23/greenstand
- Greenstand’s Haiti Tree map: https://map.treetracker.org/?bounds=-75.5364990234375,17.641458430204256,-69.91149902343751,20.169464219469415