Sustainably Investing in Digital Assets Globally

Chapter 44The Pandemic Year Ends with a Tokenized Carbon Cap‐and‐Trade Solution

Lowering CO₂ emissions and lessening carbon‐intensive approaches are the essential goals in global efforts to fight climate change. It was a blazing start to a new decade, with 13% more large, uncontrolled wildfires around the world in 2020 compared with 2019. This spelled dire consequences for CO₂ levels, which made worse a terrible COVID‐19 pandemic that led to unprecedented worldwide lockdowns that rapidly pushed the economy toward digitization.

As a result of the COVID‐19 pandemic, governments around the world were forced to focus on integrating blockchain technology into their financial services. At the 75th anniversary of the United Nations General Assembly, Sky Guo, a founding member of the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum and co‐founder of Cypherium—an enterprise‐focused platform facilitating interoperability between blockchains and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs)—discussed how the next generation of foreign policy leaders can leverage emerging digital technologies to solve the world's most pressing challenges, given that 80% of world central banks were evaluating adopting CBDCs.

Switching to CBCDs and a world financial infrastructure that heavily relies on blockchain technology can nevertheless have a formidable impact on CO₂ levels all over the world if the electricity used for energy is produced from coal or other fossil fuels that cause the highest levels of ...