TwinERGY enables citizens at the heart of the energy market – an interview

“Citizen participation and community co-ownership schemes play an increasingly societal role by fostering citizens’ participation in energy matters and raising acceptance of renewable energy. They can bring tremendous benefits for citizens and communities by placing them closer to the energy transition and fulfilling Europe’s decarbonisation goals,” says Dr. Athanasios Chassiakos as we speak with him, Dr. Stylianos Karatzas and Vasiliki Lazari about their transformative project TwinERGY.

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Accelerating Development of Transparent Finance for Climate Action – an interview with Dr. Nikola Markovic

“Acren will for the first time enable implementation of citizen-funded agro-environmental projects in a fully transparent and unambiguous way. It opens up the possibility for citizens to clearly and securely track the positive effect that each project has on the environment, and the ability to attribute the direct positive impact – such as CO2 saved, reduced pesticides – to their participation,” says Dr. Nikola Markovic, Cofounder of Social Impact Network.

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The Future of Impact Investing, the DeFi way – an interview with Nadja Bester

“Social Impact Network has identified a way to inject liquidity into Least Developed Countries by creating a new breed of impact investors. Social Impact Network leverages the rapid growth of Decentralized Finance (DeFi), a market valued at $100B. By using blockchain, the ecosystem addresses many of the challenges faced by the traditional impact investing sector, which over time will serve to introduce DeFi to a whole new cohort of investors,” says Nadja Bester who heads up marketing and communications at Social Impact Network.

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Track-and-Trace: Creating Fairer and More Transparent Supply Chains for Women-Owned Cooperatives in Morocco

“We are using distributed ledger technology to help the cooperatives better market and differentiate their products on the back of their sustainability certifications, creating products with provable certification claims and traceability back to their origin,” says Erik Zvaigzne of Convergence.tech as we talk with him, as well as Marina Petrović and Robert Pašičko of UNDP Alt Fin Lab, about their project collaboration in the DLT4EU accelerator programme.

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Smart Contracts to restore Nature – an interview with Kavyashree Umesh Bangalore

“Translating the pledges to mathematical formulas and using IoT devices to measure the actual trends in climate change in each participating nation is one way to enforce the strict rules that are missing today and bridge the value action gap,” says Kavyashree Umesh Bangalore, an experienced software engineer and research assistant at New York University Tandon School of Engineering where she applies the potential of technology to implement sustainability in economic operations.

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Following the Footprints of Nature – an interview with Dakota Walker

“It begins with an ethos of responsibility for the whole — to mimic nature’s quest to give back more than it takes. We must accept our role as contributing members of a larger system and allow that ethos to inform our day-to-day decisions,” says Dakota Walker, associate project manager and research analyst at Terrapin Bright Green, where he helps to develop advanced resource use strategies that align the built environment with the natural environment.

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The New Metric for Local Energy – Overcoming Governance Barriers – an interview with Maarja Meitern and Rolf Bastiaanssen

“The Local Levelised Costs of Energy is a new metric to help communities determine if the local sustainable energy system is a financially viable alternative to the cost of current centralised energy generation, compare long-term costs between approaches as well as demonstrate the value of smart grids,” say Maarja Meitern and Rolf Bastiaanssen as they highlight the relevance of such a new comparative basis in support of the equitable development of sustainable energy systems.

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