Carbono 21: Promoting Forestation Through Asset Tokenization

Despite its environmental benefits, forestation is often overlooked in favor of traditional crops that have negative environmental impacts. To address this problem, this work proposes Carbono 21, a digital platform that uses tokenization to create financial incentives for landowners who plant trees or preserve native vegetation in their properties. The basic idea of Carbono 21 is to transform forested areas and assets related to forestation actions into dynamic Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). These tokens are then stored on a consortium blockchain, so they can be leveraged in a variety of forestation initiatives, including forest compensation laws and strategies related to carbon credit generation. Furthermore, tokens stored in Carbono 21 are automatically updated using existing satellite and governmental data platforms, so deforestation events can be quickly identified and the corresponding NFTs frozen. In addition to these practical benefits, the solution proposes novel transparency mechanisms for permissioned blockchains. By combining this technology with the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), authorities and other entities can audit transactions and the utilization of green assets. To evaluate the feasibility of the proposal, an implementation was developed and benchmarked. The results reveal satisfactory transaction throughput and latency: small networks can generate over 750 land NFTs per second and query more than 1000 tokens every second, with average latencies of 2s and 0.1s, respectively.