The chosen proposals come from Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Trinidad and Tobago

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and its innovation laboratory, IDB Lab, announce the results of their Digital Tokens for Biodiversity Innovation Challenge. This initiative was launched to identify innovative solutions that use these instruments to promote biodiversity conservation and facilitate action in the face of climate change.

The initiative is a joint effort with the Natural Capital Lab, the IDB Group's one-stop shop for boosting financial innovation in natural capital, and with LACChain, the IDB-led global alliance for the development of blockchain technology in Latin America and the Caribbean. Digital tokens, crypto-assets, or purely digital assets, can become amplifiers of actions that stop and reverse biodiversity loss and promote nature-friendly solutions.

The initiatives selected to qualify for financial support are:

• Fundación Futuro (Ecuador): A proposal to expand the scope of the zero carbon system to offer monetary incentives to landowners for conservation and restoration, including communities favoring the transition to digital governance of DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations).
• Terrasos (Colombia): A proposal that combines the concept of biodiversity credit with digital tokens to provide greater traceability and transparency to transactions by implementing distributed ledger technologies (DTL), which store information in multiple locations at any given time.
• The Cropper Foundation (Trinidad and Tobago): A proposal to use digital tokens to incentivize agricultural sustainability and improve access to credit and capital for smallholder farmers in Trinidad and Tobago.
• Nature Services (Peru): Looks to structure socioeconomic incentives to recognize behaviors and actions in favor of biodiversity and avoid unwanted behaviors by integrating blockchain functionalities (including fungible and non-fungible tokens) and interactions between actors in a digital platform.

The selected proposals will initiate the design of their projects to become eligible to receive IDB Lab financing and develop their innovative models in the four countries mentioned. They will also become part of the IDB Group's network of global innovators to respond to the needs for the conservation of natural capital and biodiversity in our region.

The challenge received 86 proposals submitted from 21 LAC countries from startups, SMEs, non-profit organizations, corporations, think tanks, public innovation agencies, accelerators, and other organizations presenting ready-to-implement models.

A panel of IDB Group specialists evaluated the capacity of the applicants based on the degree of innovation, its social impact, scalability potential, financial sustainability, technical capacity of the organization, and the probability of execution of the proposals.