Crowdfunding
Crowdfunding in the FCN Context
Crowdfunding is an old and established arrangement to raise once-off resources for a single cause or venture. In the case of pro-poor community owned climate projects there is need for much larger, long-term, multi-year, committed contributions that will be repaid in a monetized environmental service.
In the context of the Fair Climate Network, Crowdfunding is an arrangement where a group of climate conscious individuals and/or companies, who cannot individually finance the total cost of an environmentally valuable climate activity, join together to pool resources to implement, maintain and monitor the project.
- Emission Reductions and Carbon Credits generated by the project are shared in direct proportion to their respective investments.
- However, everyone in the crowdfunding group jointly take total credit for alleviating hardships caused by the adverse effects of climate change on disadvantaged populations since the project wouldn’t have been possible without their collective effort.
The Resource Challenge
When proven clean energy technologies are to be rolled out, obtaining humungous resources is the single biggest challenge. The problem is compounded by the volatile compliance market and the voluntary market which offers only a slightly better price, far short of the actual cost of generation where pro-poor technologies are concerned.
The only way that pro-poor Climate Projects can be financed is through forward purchase/sale of yet-to-be-generated Carbon Credits at the actual-price-of-generation.
Crowdfunding Climate Projects has to be based on solidarity, with no undertone of charity or patronage, because charity it is not sustainable and cannot be scaled up. This business outlook is also propelled by the realisation that, if Homo sapiens are to survive on planet Earth, the so-called alternative of today has to become mainstream by tomorrow.
Return on Investments
Returns from micro-level Emission Reduction activities carried out by hundreds of thousands of rural women will not be on par with returns from conventional non-renewables like windmills, hydro, et al. But the added value is the possibility to involve huge numbers into the building of an alternate economy. History has proven that large scale cooperation is the only way forward for our species.
Corporate Climate Investors exhibit a far-sightedness in recognising the value of powerful stories behind the generation of high quality, non-fudged, third-party verified Emission 2 Reductions. They know that their customers will see the brink to which human beings have gone vis-à-vis Climate Change long before the economy as a whole acknowledges the fact. Click here for a detailed document in our Library.