Opening presenter:

Hello and welcome back to the Amazon investor coalition youtube channel. We’re on episode number four and it’s a very exciting one because we have four panelists four guests from two different organizations working in complementary and synergistic fashions. As a reminder this is a production pulled from a weekly call series Jonah [surname unclear] and I have been recording for the last six months. And we’re producing some really wonderful and educational content to get it out to more people and to have more investors excited about what’s possible in the Amazon region of south america.

Not Amazon the shopping company. All right so without further ado let me introduce our three guests. First up, we have Atossa Soltani. She is the director of strategy for the Amazon sacred headwaters initiative and she’s joined by her colleagues Belem Paez and Juan Manuel Crespo of the pachamama alliance. Twenty years ago, Atossa founded Amazon Watch, an organization as prolific as any we’ve seen working to protect the rainforest and indigenous rights. But today, Atossa is focused on the Sacred headwaters initiative and is building a shared vision among indigenous peoples NGOs and governments towards establishing a bi-national protected region in the Amazon, one that offers a new and alternative economic and governance model to the region.

Following Atossa, Juan Manuel, and Belem, you will hear from none other than Jonah Sachs, an author, speaker, and viral marketing pioneer whose new approaches to digital media have been truly critical in bringing ideals of social change to the forefront of business and popular culture. Talk about some weaving of magic. He’s the executive director of One project which is sponsored and funded by Justin Rosenstein, the co-founder of Asana. And the creator of the facebook like button. You may have used it. And One Project is a non-profit initiative working globally with communities to design implement and scale new forms of governance and economics that are equitable ecological, and effective.

So let’s learn together how these efforts may find synergy and help to transform the Amazon region enjoy. [Transition to the recorded call].

Moderator:

Here to contemplate alternative economic and governance models for the Amazon. We’re going to hear a 15-minute presentation from Atossa and Juanma, maybe another of their colleagues. And then we’ll go into discussion and Atossa, feel free to leave a ten-minute presentation, five at the end for a question and answer or we can leave the questions at the end after Jonah goes. Good afternoon, everybody?

Atossa Soltani:

It’s so great to see so many friends, friends and faces of colleagues I know and all of the folks I don’t know. Hello, Gregory. You’re right on my screen. So, yeah, I’m Atossa Soltani. I’m currently the director of global strategy for the Amazon sacred headwaters initiative and I’ll get into what that is. I’m also the founder and current president of the board of Amazon watch. I’ve worked in the Amazon region since 1990 was my first time down there, and it’s been a whole lifetime of learning, and I’m still learning. So it’s an honor to be here with you all.

And I’m also really excited because in the last year we have been part of a number of coalition efforts: organizations, NGOs, Indigenous peoples, academics working together across silos Nexus is a great model for that. Thank you jonah for bringing us all together. We’re in the middle of an Amazon emergency that started with the fires last year. The Amazon emergency fund is the latest creation of over 49 organizations and indigenous federations many of them on this call. Responding to the COVID emergency and also from there the emergency of the fire seasons which are in Brazil and also Bolivia.

But I’m not here to talk about that. Just want to put in a plug for that. I’m here to talk about the Amazon sacred headwaters initiative. Joining me will be Juanma Crespo, who is leading the bioregional planning efforts for the future vision of this entire ecosystem. And also Belem Paez, who’s the executive director of Fundación Pachamama and based out of Quito, Ecuador. So hello, colleagues I’ll invite you to jump in and complement what I’m going to say. I’ll first start saying that the Amazon basin—we all care about it—it’s a vital organ of the living systems of our planet.

It’s under threat. We know it’s not just one thing or another. It’s the package and the development model that is basically part of the issue. The Amazon Sacred headwaters initiative started in 2017. We’ve been helping to nurture a growing alliance of 25 indigenous nations in an area that’s about a little bit over 30, 35 million hectares of rainforest, this in all of ecuadorian Amazon and northern peruvian Amazon. It’s an ecosystem that has registered some of the highest biodiversity on Earth. And it’s where mining, oil, and industrial resource extraction is having a field day.

It’s areas that are the most biodiverse and also the most threatened by extractive economies. Now we’re working on this initiative to promote permanent protection of this region. And part of that process we’re engaging in is a promoting a collective, participatory planning process at the level of the bioregion. We’re calling it bioregional plan. , the deforestation rates. We’ve done all of that mapping. We’ve also supported indigenous peoples in coming together to help create a shared vision for where we want to go into the future. This is critical now in the COVID emergency.

The fact that we are the governments of these regions are financially strapped, they’re going deeper and deeper into debt, and with a loss of revenues from traditional economic activities, and as we talk about post-COVID recovery we’re really it’s an opportunity. Our work has never been more timely. Than now in putting together the vision of the postcovid green ecosocial pact, a new ecosocial pact for the Amazon in this area. So in the process, we have done a lot of baseline research up to now and now we’re part of the bioregional planning which I’ll ask Juanma to talk about.

But it really it’s a participatory visioning and planning exercise. With the participation of policy experts, civil society, indigenous peoples to create a shared vision for a new post-extractive ecological era in this area one that prioritizes the protection of the most biodiverse rainforests and one where indigenous peoples and nationalities are held as key actors and advancing governance of these territories. The sacred headwaters initiative has done tons of workshops and studies as I said but really the central goal of our bioregional plan is to improve the living conditions, maintain the biodiversity and the cultures, defend the rights of the communities and Indigenous peoples, advance the legal recognition of their territories, which is I would say around majority of this landscape is indigenous territories and protected areas.

It’s to keep fossil fuels in the ground and minerals in the ground, and avoid large-scale industrial mining and to also restore, reforest, and regenerate this ecosystem. So those are the goals of the bioregional plan. I want to ask Juanma Crespo to come in to give us a sense of where we are. We’re in the midst of it now. In fact, COVID has actually helped us all like hunker down and be doing this research phase. It’s actually been really helpful. And we’ve been leading lots of participatory calls with global experts bringing in innovative ideas from the outside, but also working—Ecuador, as you recall, was one of the first countries who put out some innovative ideas, like we need to focus the economy on buen vivir or on sumak kawsay, on this idea of well-being.

Instead of economic growth. Ecuador was one of the first countries that promoted the rights of nature in its constitution. And it was also one of the first countries to really propose an idea of leaving fossil fuels in the ground. So we are building on those initial ideas. And saying now is the time for those ideas. So my colleague, Juanma, please give us maybe show us the map. [Name unclear], I don’t know if you can give us the access to give everyone a visual here of the map and also to tell us sort of like basically where we are with this effort.

Juan Manuel Crespo:

Thank you. Yeah, thank you, Atossa. Very nice to meet you all. I’m Juanma Crespo. I’m from Ecuador. As Atossa introduced me, I work for the Sacred Headwaters Initiative, mainly in the bioregional planning a working group. But the idea was to locate you into where we are located: the entire Amazon of Ecuador that is shared with the northern Peruvian Amazon is an area of more than 35 million hectares of Amazon of mainly living forests. Especially, it’s very interesting because it’s more than 60 percent of it is Indigenous territory. It’s very important to focus that it is maybe one of the most important areas in the entire Amazon because of the [context description unclear] of the bioregion, that is very unique, especially about the sacred the headwaters of the Amazon so it’s.

Very special. But the main idea of this bioregional plan is to give us like a guideline for the next 10 years, so we can have some influence not only on the governments from Ecuador and Peru. But also in the in the local stakeholders. As Atossa mentioned, this is an initiative that comes from the indigenous organizations from the Amazon. And is very important for us to give them the to give them the space and the participation of how we can plan a ten-year plan of a bioregion that is not only is not only focused on one country or in another but to see that this is a more complex area that responds to different approaches and different and different variabilities of what we have to have in mind.

So our main goal in the process is to have all these different consultants’ expertise, but also from the local people, that give us their main agendas, their main strategies from a political view of giving them more reinforcement to their autonomy, autonomous governance. And the bottom line is to defend their territories. In the end, we are sure that if we leave it to the governments or the state of state’s responsibility to protect these areas, we will not succeed. So the idea is to [verb unclear] a different political actor that gives us a path to transition a transition model to a post-extractive economy in our countries but also in the region.

Mainly in the region. Also, it is to transcend this idea of nation-state paradigm of development and go beyond to a bioregional planning that comes from the from the local perspective of a spatial planning and so on. So I will add that to Atossa, mainly for the purpose of the presentation of the bioregional plan and maybe later on we can talk more about different details that we have. I don’t know if Belem would like to add something. It would be great to have your vision also.

Moderator:

And then would you like to jump in there you are.

Belem Paez:

Hi, everyone. This is Belem Paez from Ecuador. I’m the executive director of Fundación pachamama and also working as the officer of programs for the Amazon in the pachamama alliance office in California. And working also for the sacred headwaters initiative. Maybe just to add that with this bioregional living plan that we expect to implement over the next 10 years will focus on different new aspects on what is possible for Ecuador but also for the Amazon region in Peru and Ecuador. We are thinking that it’s possible to increase the work that we do already in the ground on bioeconomy agenda.

Working with the local governments especially with provinces of Pastaza, Morona Santiago, Amazonas in Peru. So we are thinking over the this agenda of bioeconomy to start like several projects that are already in place. Some others are like really new ones. And we see that also the government of Ecuador is really leading these bioregional agendas as part of their public policy so we see also like complementary work with the indigenous organizations in the ground like 30 Indigenous nations working through this new moment of consolidating their agenda on bioeconomy. Also, at the macro level, Ecuador and Peru are really affected by COVID threats, and we really need to look forward to create new mechanisms to solve poverty and other problems that are going to be really increasing in the next months.

We have seen with the central bank of Ecuador and with many other organizations possibilities of [debt mechanism wording unclear] for conservation. For example, we are looking forward to create new mechanisms and to learn more about how a green financial mechanism can be put in place. Starting with really learning about external debt, how we can really start doing these debt negotiations with the creditors and looking forward also to bring to this table other people who can help us within the government of Ecuador to start creating new models to bring financial models to bring finance to the Amazon region.

That would be my sharing for now. Thank you.

Unidentified participant — Sacred Headwaters Initiative:

Sorry, I finally put the map up. So you can have this idea here you can see this is Ecuador. This is the border with Peru, and here is Colombia. So our initiative this whole purple area is the influence area of the initiative and the yellow the yellow region is our effective area of the initiative. Then these colors are about indigenous territories so you can see how many of them are inside of the initiative, and you can have an idea of how much of the Amazon is this initiative, this bioregion of Sacred Headwaters.

You can now have a visual a visual support.

Moderator:

Great. We’re going to need to move on. Atossa, did you want to say one last thing.

Atossa Soltani:

What we will be doing is a process of unveiling the aspects of the bioregional plan by the end of this year and then engaging governments in dialogue about how this becomes gets implemented. The implementation includes the creation of a sacred headwaters trust fund or fund a fund for the implementation of the bioregional plan. And so there’s a lot of a lot more to say about it. This is just the beginning. I will say that also part of the plan is what we actually do in the bioregion. And part of the plan is how the strategy that we are we’re basically putting forth is a larger macro transition strategy for the countries of Ecuador and Peru in addition to what actually gets implemented in the bioregion.

What is the larger transition, post-extractive transition, reducing debt burden and changing the focus of the economies from an economy that’s driven by growth and GDP, to good economies that are more driven by well-being by health and well-being. And caring and sharing economies. So the goals of the system are as important as what we do. So with that, I’m sure there’s we can send folks more information. You can read about it, and also happy to answer it.

Moderator:

And we’ll have more time at the end of the call to get into it so on these questions of democratizing macro level economic decision making and the exploration of alternative governance systems and local economy or alternative economy alternative economies and cooperatives and if you want to experiment redesigning the system there are a few that excite me more than the experimentation of Jonah Sachs and Justin Rosenstein. So, Jonah, please share with us a little bit about you guys and your explorations.

Jonah Sachs:

Sure. Hi, everybody, and pleased to be here. Great to see you, Atossa, and hear from you again. So jonah and I have been talking a little bit about One Project and the work that Justin rosenstein and I have been doing together where we’re generating hypotheses basically for new economics and governance models to radically more democratize and align with ecological limits human civilization essentially and seeing where we can build the right experiments that can bring such things to scale. And so when I was explaining a couple of the hypotheses that we had jonah said oh you should really bring this to this group we are looking for partner communities to try some of these experiments in co-creation with.

And when he was mentioning this group we said, “Yeah, of course. ”. So I don’t know if what we’re thinking here is going to work or if it fits exactly with any of the programs you all are running but I think it might be an interesting kind of group to bounce these ideas off of and to get some feedback. And potential partnership on so I’ll try so I’ll try to share my screen here. On this presentation. All right. So it’s a very rough internal presentation but okay, so One Project is a collaboration between myself and Justin Rosenstein.

Justin built Google Drive. He invented the facebook like button. He’s built a software company called Asana. And he’s a kind of a technologist who’s been trying to help human collaboration for the last 15 years and then finding all of his great ideas are getting gobbled up by surveillance capitalism and decided to leave the tech world behind, the for-profit tech world behind, and devote all of his resources and all of his time to try to make the world a better place. I’ve been working in social change for the last 20 years so running big campaigns for Amnesty, helped to build The Story of Stuff Project.

I’m on the board of Greenpeace. Hi, Daniel. And so we are working in that social change world. And one of the hypotheses of how we can help experiment using technology and money, finance, and social technologies to bring about new economic systems is something that we’re calling commons Unlimited, just as a placeholder name. We’re really interested in how the commons as a sector of the economy and politics can come to have a much larger role in global economics and to push out some of the more extractive capitalist models. And essentially we’re thinking about an idea of a commons-based holding company that sustainably and equitably manages resources.

So the idea here is to challenge models of ownership of the dominant system by creating a network of businesses that share information, that share capital, that share resources but that are owned by not just the workers, but by the community that they serve. Eventually we’d like to have the possibility to have companies that are owned by the entire world not in the public IPO kind of public capitalist market way but truly everyone is a stakeholder in some of these some of these initiatives. So you can imagine us you know thinking about well there’s so much headwind to challenging these dominant models.

How do you do it? If you picture a network of sustainable agricultural projects and platform cooperatives so you know social media companies that are owned by their users, and real estate holdings for in-perpetuity protecting land, know imagine a network across the world of these different companies, how would they come to compete against, say venture capital or private equity to acquire these resources and then to manage them by all stakeholders? Well, we’re looking at a number of different places where we might have some types of advantage against the current system. We believe that we have a moral mandate.

So people who are looking to exit to community from their current businesses might be more willing to sell into a commons-based approach to management as more sustainable you know because we’d be managing not to profit but to goals- based management. As more sustainability mandates come from governments we feel like we would have long-term well-managed businesses. And that consumers of products as well as local governments might also see the strong value of companies owned by [phrase incomplete]. So we believe that having goals- based management, not managing to short-term or even long-term profit but managing to goals of people, place, and ecosystems, also will give us a sort of not just a moral mandate but longer term will help us manage businesses better.

And then the thing that I think is kind of the most interesting is we’ve been experimenting a lot with both advanced sense-making and advanced choice-making, asking this kind of question: how does a company in which its workers and its customers are genuine stakeholders in the project how does it get better intelligence? How does the crowd make better decisions than a board of directors who are focused on short-term profits? How can you leverage basically global intelligence to make better decisions and to have you know advantage in producing products in the marketplace in a smart way, and then returning the value that’s created to an ever-growing community.

And we kind of call this upgraded democracy: this combination of better sense making and better choice-making by the publics. So in current modern democracy we see it based on seventeenth-century technology and mindsets that you know democracy we practice now was never really meant to economically empower everyone and the you know the ideas of how we make choices is based on a world where people can’t really interact with each other and make strong sense of the world. It was based on the thinking at a time before you know even television existed, no less the internet.

So we see in a in the modern democracy we’ve got this problem. So even a democratically managed business right now is full of low information voters. We have this problem of eroding shared sources of truth, lots of incentives to misinform, and then proposals for solutions coming only from elites. So we’re looking at models where, know using technology and using social science theory figuring out ways where people can build networks of trust. With each other where experts are commissioned to do public good research so kind of a top-down and bottom-up approach.

To making sense of the world; accountability, where gaming the system and misinforming is penalized. And where proposals for solution can come from every level of the ecosystem that supports this network of cooperatives and businesses. And in choice-making, how does a company make choices about what to invest in, what products to create, how to manage its resources? Well, we think the one-person, one-vote, win-lose dynamics, representative democracy, small groups of choice-makers, is a broken system. And that we’re experimenting with ways using liquid democracy, using citizen councils and citizen juries where voters can prioritize what they most care about and trade votes on what they care about less.

That basically groups of people can come together and using technology really manage a resource in a more intelligent way, and thus begin that process of creating more sustainable value. We’re even looking at models of alternative currencies so that local currencies can be created or the system can subsidize for people within the system to be able to buy more sustainable products or engage in more sustainable business practices. So we can actually. Reward managers of businesses who are not necessarily creating traditional value but are creating more long-term sustainable value. And eventually, in a system like this, you can really program in or model in systemic equity.

So capitalist models sort of have a as we all know this growth-at-all-costs mindset, but also inequality at all at-all-costs mindset. And in a system. That’s more self-contained a network of businesses that are sharing and trading resources a network of customers that are working together you can disincentivize conglomeration of power and money, and really work to find ideal levels of equity within the system. So we think combining all of these experiments that we’re running right now some of our design resources that we’re using we’re hoping that we really can create a challenge to the dominance of the market state.

And our goal right now is to really do very small experiments with communities. So the last thing that we want to do is to sort of bring a bunch of businesses into a system that’s half created and then have those businesses fail. But looking at you know are there ways that worker cooperatives can we meet the needs of worker cooperatives get them into deeper collaboration with each other and then could begin to grow that system. And when I shared these ideas with Jonah, he was saying you know that so many businesses in the Amazon are already worker cooperatives that their need for capital is kind of high and but there’s not a lot of incentive for people to invest there’s already an understanding, maybe a better an understanding maybe a better understanding than we have through our research through the practice of worker cooperatives that are happening in the Amazon that might really bring power to this type of movement.

Again, this is an early-stage hypothesis we’re looking for partner communities who are interested in playing with such ideas, business owners. We think that while there’s going to be a giant rush on you know to buy distressed businesses right now by venture capitalists—or, sorry, by private equity and we don’t want to see you know local businesses all getting swallowed up by private equity when a new model might be more powerful and more equitable and ultimately lead to protecting this planet that we all rely on and love. So that’s the very brief 10-minute overview of this large gnarly hypothesis we’re working on but hopefully this could be a starting point for exploration and you know questions if you guys have them.

Moderator:

Great. I’m going to lead off the questions I’m wondering if the representative that we have from the Brazilian development bank, [acronym unclear], have you guys engaged in investments in cooperatives? Are these ideas brand new to you? Do you see it a way to collaborate and then? After you respond let’s open up the floor to others and we’ll do about five minutes of responses and then we’ll open up to include the sacred headwaters team as well.

Leonardo — Brazilian development bank:

Hi, yeah. Just to introduce again, Leonardo from the [bank acronym unclear]. We have a long-term experience in the Amazon since 2017. And we had a lot of initiatives much more focused on the reduction of the deforestation, and now we are looking into this topic again with all our strength. The focus of our president in the bank is to be the benchmark worldwide of green finance or green economy, which I can call it this way. I’ll be relocated to the Amazon, so I’ll I’ll be based there the next five months in order to connect the real world with the financial market not only in Brazil but in world.

So I think I didn’t respond. Exactly a question but just to give you a bit of an overview of what we are seeing now and about cooperatives. Indirectly, yes. I don’t have an example here but I’m sure somehow our money got to the to this type of entities, but not enough. We are aware of that. The bank is seeing itself as a way to leverage the international capital providing seed money first-loss structures, blended finance, in order to leverage the investments in the region. And in a sustainable way.

Unidentified participant:

Other questions? [Brief moderation] Jonah, just to complete [wording unclear], I think this I’m very happy with that focus of the bank now. And if you look back at the Amazon fund yes they had projects with cooperatives. And a good example would be the ones with Conexsus. I don’t know if you’ve met them, but they have some amazing projects with cooperatives. We can share later.

Moderator:

Great. Questions?

Marco:

Just to say, Jonah, Marco here. I’m on the board of Conexsus, so happy to happy to make the connection directly and I was thinking of the same point. They did. They did a an analysis of the entire cooperative movement and found basically 1,500 different cooperatives and associations working all across the Amazon and beyond in Brazil at community level. So there’s a huge analysis being done already that can be worked from. So my question to you would be do you have some examples already of things that you have been doing in communities so that we know what we can you know what we can start with.

Jonah Sachs:

No. So we don’t have any examples. We’ve just come out of a launch phase. The project’s brand new, where we came up with two or three hypotheses that we want to take forward into prototyping. We have not yet started and so this is early stage.

Moderator:

And so if someone wanted to apply to seek an investment in an experiment what would the process look like?

Jonah Sachs:

The process would look like talking to me and explaining kind of where you’re at. I think we’re probably not at the phase where we’re going to be I mean, we are a grantmaking organization as well, so we are putting money into some projects on a smaller scale but we are looking for partners who are who are saying would be willing to say “Yes, we can introduce you to this ecosystem of businesses or the ecosystem of leaders who want to talk,” that we can then begin to interview to understand their needs, to understand how a system like this might work for them.

So it’d be kind of a longer term process of us designing with communities how this system might work. We intend of course to support the communities as we with financial resources as we know gain understanding through them. So if. This appeals and you have ideas certainly I’ll put my email address in here but obviously there’s other ways to find it but yeah please just reach out.

Moderator:

Any other questions? Okay broader questions.

Unidentified participant:

Jonah, you guys mentioned blockchain technology, and how are you thinking about that? When you talk about the this new type of currency is that what you’re thinking about?

Jonah Sachs:

Yeah I mean we have we’ve modeled out some ideas for this. Also fairly nascent, but the idea that there might be within this system within this ecosystem of businesses if there was a blockchain currency you might be able to allow for some investment from the outside to come in that would have a different kind of ownership model for the you wouldn’t have like external investors who hold in perpetuity. We could convert dollars into this currency and then use it in different ways than a typical investment model. Also, it would be a way for businesses to share resources with each other and again to sort of reward with this currency certain actions within the system other than just sort of raw profit.

So we have looked into it. A lot of the of the alternative economic systems that we’ve looked at that are online are alternative currency systems that do a lot of this incentivization. But don’t own any assets. It’s just a kind of a currency an exchange marketplace. And kind of what we think is the important innovation is actually that there are valuable real-world things that undergird an alternative currency as opposed to just an alternative currency that floats around out there.

Moderator:

Anyone else?

Gregory:

That’s a really rich conversation and I it’s one that I would love to have in more detail I think there’s a really powerful possibility although it warrants a lot of careful consideration. Around how we sort of underpin a sort of virtual cooperative currency structure with ecological health, for instance, or social health outcomes. But knowing the great work. That’s happening with the sacred headwaters initiative that’s long been something I thought would be very interesting is what would it look like for an Indigenous-inspired and led definition of how to base some sort of exchange and currency system [wording unclear]?

So I would actually love to hear Atossa or the Sacred Headwaters people sort of speak to what their perception is on you know that question of how do we value the health of the living system appropriately and how they’re sensing the tribes relate to things like carbon credits and things like that. I think that would be really powerful to hear about.

Unidentified participant — Sacred Headwaters Initiative:

Thanks, Gregory, for that question. It’s definitely it’s it’s definitely one of the challenges. We do have do have a working group that’s looking at alternative systems of exchange we’re not calling it currency. We’re calling it mechanisms of exchange. We’re learning about what’s actually worked. The other day, just a couple days ago, last week, we had a presentation on the [currency name unclear], the currency that’s emerging in Amazonian communities is one possibility. But exactly, the question of the question of indicators of wealth and well-being has to shift entirely. We know we kind of know what it could look like.

Over here in the future. We kind of know where we are now. What we don’t know is what is it going to take to get from here to there? That’s a big question for us. I will say that the indigenous peoples through their own participatory processes of creating life plans are addressing things like what are the indicators of well-being in their territories, like food sovereignty, like alternative education and health, community health, ecosystem health, biodiversity, forest cover. Those are real measures of well-being and health. In their communities. How do those measures then become the basis of an wealth recognition by the outside world?

True wealth. How do we define true wealth in those terms so yeah I mean? For example, Indigenous peoples have this system of trade. But we’ve also talked about what it would look like. And then we look at economically what is it that they’re they’re mostly living in trade and self-sufficiency. Basically raising their own food, creating their own you know trade around their medicinal plants, their healthcare, and their housing, all of those things. But what is it that is requiring them to be part of a market economy? And how do we remove those things that require them to be part of a market economy so that the true exchange of basically meeting their basic needs happens?

[less or outside the market; wording unclear]? For example, we know that the educational system in Peru requires every family to spend somewhere between 70 to 120 dollars per child per year in dollars to get school supplies for their school. So if they have 10 kids that’s you know that’s basically one of their primary money needs in some of the indigenous communities. Obviously, there’s a range of what they use money for but in some of the communities that are otherwise self-sufficient, their educational system is requiring them to participate in the market.

So finding ways to [phrase unfinished], we’re actually looking at convivial basic income or conservation basic income as a way of reducing the need to be dependent on an on a market economy in order to sell your products to buy school supplies seems antithetical for a place like the Amazon. So yeah I don’t know if that answers your question, but on valuing real wealth, you know if the [currency name unclear], they were talking about how the territories can serve as the real asset, the progress of forests and ecosystems and biodiversity as the true wealth for the basis of an alternative system of exchange.

But yeah we’re in the middle of a lot of those conversations and we welcome Jonah and Gregory, we welcome you guys into these working groups where we’re actually doing a lot of these conversations.

Moderator:

Great, Atossa. If you can put a link to the working group information maybe your email address in the chat area and about blockchain and activity in the Amazon I’d like to call on [name unclear] or a member of moeda. To just talk about what they’re doing are you there, [name unclear]?

Unidentified participant(s) — brief greeting:

Yes, yes. It’s a pleasure. [brief greeting] Hey, good to see you. Good to see you too.

Moeda representative:

So I run Moeda. We built the first cryptocurrency for the cooperatives in the world. We started in Brazil. It’s been three years, but my journey has been with cooperatives since my father. He built one of the largest credit programs directly towards the cooperative system in Brazil. I took his legacy, and with technology I’m helping to expanding it. So we go from microcredit and financing the first stage of projects into a cooperative providing the technical assistance till they have a product that we can commercialize into the marketplace. So one of the examples that I can share here this moment—everything that we do is towards this ecosystem so we provide for the projects and for the investors in those projects.

A comprehensive panorama of what is going on, and every single every single dollar or [currency unclear]. Most of the investors are from China today. They can see into the blockchain information like where this is going on. So here you see our methodology. People from this [phrase unclear], that was a beer that we invested early stage. And we take [phrase incomplete]. For me, I’m passionate about what I what I do so I also like to present, this is the [beer name unclear] beer. So that was the project made from the first investment that was very successful.

From the projects, we control them with the administrative system that we created. We have 200 cooperatives today that we supported. First with the finance, and here we sometimes we handle like problems with governance and details into each cooperative we measure the impact on the metrics with the SDGs. And also sometimes we measure what was very helpful for this time, the risks in the investment and everything that they have to manage better the money that we invest and to create a good value for the final product. We create scenarios, and most of the cooperatives last year, they remember doing a super-pessimistic scenario, because now they found these tools that we provided valuable to deal with all the complexity that we live today.

And we have also the marketplace so you can see that the marketplace is connected with the banking the digital banking account so when someone purchases a product coming either from the food or the beer and the projects that we helped, that money goes directly into their banking account. So we take out fees, and for the microcredit as well. Here are also systems that we use in the Amazonia to measure temperature water. So we go with the blockchain technology into really deep information for our investors to really see like the value that is going to through the people, and as well to the benefit sustainable benefit as well for the for the land.

That’s a little. Brief [closing wording unclear].

Moderator:

Can you leave you leave a web link and maybe your name and email in the chat window so others can follow?

Moeda representative:

Yes, absolutely.

Moderator:

There was another question I saw that I didn’t call on.

Unidentified participant:

Was that me? ”] just quick this is really interesting stuff I think there’s never been more of a an opportunity to talk about systemic change in the way business is done and what we value. We’re not going to get ourselves out of the mess in the Amazon unless we like really address underlying development models. I think this project is really exciting. In terms of finding a way to illustrate what development could what like real development could look like. Part of me is also curious about I noticed the principles on the one project website which look really powerful like just transition.

In the Amazon, something that’s on top of my mind a lot these days I’m also curious about the prospect of leakage of the problems that are trying to be addressed with some of these projects so just the quick question is there already a process in mind to consider you know the typical problems that tend arise with you know this is not necessarily a carbon credit project, but the leakage, additionality, and permanence of the investments? I wonder if that’s part of the method the terms of reference and methodology moving forward and developing this plan.

Thanks.

Jonah Sachs:

Yeah, okay. I can respond, maybe—we’re running out of time but we are aware of the of the negative externalities that can come with like all implementation systems and all that and really trying to take a community first approach to the design to sort of anticipate those things. Especially with justin’s justin’s foundational story being inventing the Like button in order to try to spread love on a network and seeing its awful consequences. So we are we are looking at that and again, early stages, but very interesting.

Unidentified participant — Sacred Headwaters Initiative:

And in terms of the sacred headwaters initiative I think we are looking at you know one of the things Indigenous people said is that they don’t want to just say, “Leave fossil fuels in the ground here,” and then drill over here so the articulation of the bioregion is that they want a moratorium. They want actually a permanent phase out of extractive economies. In this in this important area and then you know when we look at the map Juanma showed you, the core area and the buffer zone. A lot of the destruction is happening there.

So it’s really [phrase unfinished]. A when we draw a boundary over here we realize we actually have to take into account the pressures that are coming from outside of the landscape too. ” So one of those systemic solutions is about changing the model, the extractive economy model. And the other is around land rights and governance rights of indigenous peoples seeing indigenous peoples as governors of their territory, not just communities but nations that are building their own governance structures to maintain biodiversity, forest cover, well-being, health, education, transportation, all those functions. So it is really moving governance to the people who are the stewards of the of the forest.

Moderator:

Okay, folks, we have run out of time. There’s obviously a very exciting conversation here, and we will have opportunities to join. I’m going to make sure that everyone gets through email a link to the LinkedIn group, which is a an online platform where we can connect with each other and where we can mature these conversations. Just to repeat, this is part of an ongoing process of the global governance philanthropy network and its Amazon investor coalition. Make sure you guys see those websites and the reports on rule of law philanthropy and impact investing and other exploration that we’re doing.

I’ll make sure that you all get that through email as it matures. Thank you, Pachamama Alliance team. Thank you, One Project team, Jonah Sachs and colleagues. We very much look forward to more have a good one.