Impact Credits You Can Trust

This in a social and ecological context refers to the effect or influence that actions or activities have on society and the environment. Social impact involves changes to community well-being, like improved education or health, while ecological impact relates to the environment, like reducing pollution or conserving resources. It's about the positive or negative outcomes of what we do on people and the planet.

In the context of social and ecological projects, "output" and "outcome" have specific meanings:

Output: Refers to the immediate products or services resulting from activities. For example, planting 1000 trees or conducting 50 educational workshops are outputs. They are quantifiable and easy to measure.

Outcome: Represents the longer-term effects or changes due to the outputs. In our examples, outcomes might be improved air quality from the trees or higher literacy rates from the workshops. Outcomes are about the impact and are often less immediately measurable.

In essence, outputs are what you do, while outcomes are the differences made by what you do.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a set of 17 global goals set by the United Nations in 2015. They aim to address global challenges like poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace, and justice. The SDGs are a blueprint for achieving a better and more sustainable future for all by 2030.

IRIS+ is a system for measuring, managing, and optimizing impact. It's developed by the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN). IRIS+ provides a comprehensive set of metrics for impact investors to measure and report on the social and environmental performance of their investments. It helps ensure that impact investments are effective and transparent.

This refers to the measure of the impact that a person, organization, or product has on the environment and society.

The ecological footprint in business context represents the environmental effect, often in terms of the amount of resources required to deliver a product, service and for general business operations. It's a way to quantify the demand placed on Earth's ecosystems.

The social footprint represents the social effect, focusing on the (in general negative) effects that influences have on social systems. It might include factors like employment practices, community engagement, and the overall contribution to or detriment of societal well-being.

These footprints are useful for understanding and managing the sustainability of actions and practices.

Think of a blockchain as a digital record book. Instead of keeping records in one place (like a single computer or server), the information is copied and spread across a network of computers. Each page of this record book is called a "block," and they're all linked together in a chain.

Whenever new information is added, it's put into a new block, and everyone's copy of the record book updates. This makes it really hard to change older information because you'd have to change it on every single copy at the same time.

So, blockchain is like a shared, super-secure digital diary that a bunch of people have copies of and can write in, but no one can easily change what's already been written. This is why it's used for things like digital money (crypto currencies) or for NFTs and keeping track of who owns what.

In the context of blockchain, an "NFT" stands for Non-Fungible Token. It's a unique type of token that represents ownership of a specific, one-of-a-kind item or asset, making it different from interchangeable tokens like cryptocurrencies. NFTs can represent digital or physical assets, such as artwork, collectibles, real estate or for other use types.

in the case of LOOMPACT-based NFTs, they are unique certificates of realized social or environmental impact. Each NFT has distinct information or attributes that make it unique and verifiable on the blockchain, providing proof of ownership and origin.

If positive eco/social effects that are to be generated in the future are sold, you cannot be sure if the impact promised will ever be generated. Two examples:

If a tree is planted today and also the amount of CO₂ sequestered by that tree for the next 30 years is sold in a CO₂ credit the same day, it is a prediction into the future. It might be that in average this tree will have a life-span of 30 years, but who knows if it'll burn down in a wildfire in 5 years.

Or let's take a social project that promises to teach 1000 homeless children in the next 5 years with the money you spent today. But the organization that sold you that credit or donation doesn't survive the next year or is not able to attract enough children with their educational offer.

Generally: only outcomes that have been already created are the ones that can guarantee, that the positive effect was achieved with the money spent on supporting that activity. And another effect: if you spent money for already realized impact, you support organizations that have proven their effectiveness in creating the desired outcomes and will grow their positive work with the revenue from selling the Credits.

At first glance it seems so - at second, the opposite is the case. In the usual business world it would be strange to pay for a non-existing product and to just hope for getting a product for the money spent, without a chance to get the money back, if I don't get the product. But as of today, that's usual in the world of donations & impact. You spend money for a promised effect, only left with the hope that this promise will materialize in future. Think about it - it is purely strange.

Take a city's street cleaning service: it also gets paid by the ton of waste they collect. Their eco impact is a clean city and they need to prove that they collected the reported amount of waste - otherwise they don't get paid. That is "impact as a product/service" and so we should think more about such an approach on a global scale.

To balance out eco/social footprints just by compensating against them with offsetting credits is not a primary solution - but it helps to speed up the world's transformation towards more sustainability.

To reduce footprints along the value chain internally in the corporate must be the main goal. It is a must to have a strategic insetting plan & aims to report against regularly. But we all know, Rome wasn't built in a day and transformation of larger businesses take time.

To bridge that gap offsetting can help so accelerate that on a global scale. E.g. if my plan to get rid of using plastic in my value chain will take about 10 years, why not supporting plastic waste collection projects around the world meanwhile with buying their Impact Credits. That will at least help a bit to stop plastic pollution on the "waste end" while the corporate is working to stop the pollution on the "emitting end".

Both must go hand-in-hand: insetting as a basis, offsetting as a tool for mitigation meanwhile.

That is true & false the same way. Blockchain had it's roots in so-called "proof-of-work" (PoW) networks that needed enormous amounts of energy to solve complex mathematical problems for creating new token or to verify transactions. One of these blockchains still is the most well-known one - Bitcoin.

Since the beginnings of digital ledger technologies, that has changes dramatically: the majority of blockchains today use methods like "proof-of-stake" (PoS) and/or "proof-of-history" (PoH) that don't require to solve math puzzles anymore. LOOMPACT NFT also uses one of these PoS/PoH networks (Solana). Generally you can say: with these modern chains there's less energy needed per transaction than a Google search request in average needs (see https://solana.com/news/solana-energy-usage-report-november-2021).

It depends on a couple of factors: how "sturdy" is your reporting and KPI model? What kind of KPI you are going to offer? Have you already created that outcome and about what quantities we're talking? Have you already got an external audit/certification? These are just some of the questions that we need to ask you in our evaluation process. In short: reach out to us and we take a closer look if we can set up an Impact Credit placement project for you.

The first part is prior to selling the Credits: consulting about the right presentation of the KPIs to be sold, market soundings, NFT designs, help with checking in data to our reporting & transparency platform and the technical setup of course.

The second part, if wanted by the issuer is selling: depending on the found sweet spot in the market sounding phase before, we do active placements of your Credits in the B2B and/or B2C environment.

Generally our intention is, that you're able to focus on your operations in creating the impact. We take care of structuring & selling these outcomes to generate new revenue streams for the issuing organization.