How carbon offsetting and blockchains could improve the air quality in Port Harcourt, Nigeria?
Since 2016, the city of Port Harcourt located in the Niger Delta, an important oil centre, is suffering from a worsening “Black Soot” issue. Thin particles emitted by gas flaring related to oil extraction, but also by illegal oil refining and by using this artisanal fuel frequently make the air unbreathable and the air index of that city often reaches the world highest values.
Moreover, this issue goes beyond health since it is also damaging the whole economy of Rivers State. Fishing and farming activities, important sources of employment, are declining as the ecosystem suffers from altered water quality and acidic streams.
Despite media attention, population protest campaigns, such as #StopTheSoot, and attempts of the local authorities to mitigate this major health threat, this issue remains mainly unsolved until now.
This failure is logical as the root of the problem is, in the end, the unchanged severe poverty that deadlocks the situation. Indeed, we should not expect any voluntary reduction of the oil theft when the survival of people there depends on this source of income, neither we cannot expect oil companies to reallocate their profits to such an extent that the economy of the whole Sub-Saharan Africa would be transformed. Nevertheless, carbon offsetting could play the role of a third-party player bringing a share of the funds that are lacking.
The need of corporates to compensate their carbon emissions could be leveraged to generate benefits for the air quality of cities such as Port Harcourt. Heath improvement, the actual intended goal here, would come as an additional benefit from the carbon emission mitigation.
Opportunities of carbon mitigation could be, for example, to give access through subsidies to higher quality fuels for power generation, to improve the oil infrastructure to reuse the gas that is currently lost while being burned in the flare stacks or simply to subsidise business development to increase the employment rate and thus to reduce the incentive to participate in the oil theft.
Nevertheless, this mechanism would remain a pious wish if there would not be a secure way for the carbon offsetting funds to effectively reach the projects they would have to finance. That is where blockchains could play their part.
Most blockchains are designed as tamper-proof open source accounting registers, giving the opportunity to monitor precisely the use of the funds. Moreover, they are decentralized by definition and thus well suited for collective decision-making. That would give the opportunity to submit in a transparent manner any proposal of carbon offsetting project to a pool of voters after an open debate towards its efficiency.
In addition, when macroeconomic surveys sometimes lack accuracy in their cost-benefit analyses, because of data access issues, with blockchains we could benefit directly and at low cost from insights of the inhabitants themselves in the decision-making process.
