The IOTA Foundation has announced it will co-host and sponsor Hack4Climate, a blockchain hackathon developed in partnership with the United Nations COP23 climate conference.

Hacking the Climate

The hackathon will take place from November 12-16 during COP23, the world’s largest international climate change conference. It will be hosted at the U.N. campus in Bonn, Germany. IOTA will serve as a presenting partner for the hackathon, and the Ethereum Foundation is contributing as a workshop partner.

According to the event website, there will be six events that will give competitors the opportunity to develop blockchain-based solutions to some of the most prominent challenges facing environmental sustainability. For instance, entrants will attempt to develop a system that integrates Internet of Things (IoT) technology into a distributed ledger to track carbon emissions throughout the global supply chain and facilitates a P2P carbon exchange.

Hackathon applications are open to the public, and event organizers will select 100 people to compete for €75,000 in prizes.

‘Hippy Signs Won’t Change Anything’

IOTA founder David Sønstebø told CCN.com the IOTA Foundation was inspired to co-sponsor the hackathon because distributed ledger technology has the potential to allow the world to address climate change in a new, more-effective way. Noting that climate change has already begun to have ruinous effects on the lives of millions of people across the globe, he says that it is vital to develop technologies that can easily be integrated into large-scale industries to promote sustainability.

Hippy signs and chants won’t change anything, we know from history that it is always technology that ultimately changes the status quo. Distributed Ledger Technology has the potential to secure and make available tamper proof data relevant to the climate crisis in a whole new manner, as well as enable new models of smart grids, EV charging networks etc.

Several crypto startups have attempted to contribute to the fight against climate change. Aussie project Power Ledger, for instance, just raised $17 million AUD in an ICO for its solar energy marketplace.

However, Sønstebø believes that IOTA’s Tangle protocol is uniquely suited to tackle these problems on a more comprehensive scale:

These are real world use cases that necessity forces through, given that currently only IOTA can scale to match these large scale ecosystems it is a no-brainer for us to support this effort. Hackathons are tremendous for coming up with new innovative minimum viable prototypes that may, over time, become a killer application, which is why IOTA love to sponsor and host these.

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