A number of America- and United kingdom-based companies have partnered with another company in Tokyo, Japan to allow farmers in Africa access to markets on Wall Street and California’s Silicone Valley. These companies are carbon-neutral, and include Carbon Capture Shield, Inc. in Washington D.C, WQ, Inc. in Tokyo, and The Carbon Farm, Ltd. and Dark Green Carbon, Ltd., both based in Jersey, UK.
Through a programme/competition called the XPRIZE Carbon Removal, which will focus on a plan to utilize carbon offsets bought by companies like Microsoft or Morgan Stanley and, in turn, use those funds to pay farmers to regenerate their land through a process known as “carbon farming.” Their team is collaborating with scholars including Dr Elaine Ingham PhD, as well as a global network of skilled soil scientists and farmers.
The $100 million XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition aims to combat climate change by challenging global innovators to create technologies that can remove carbon dioxide straight from the atmosphere or oceans and permanently store it in an environmentally-friendly manner.
“We’re enabling smallholder farmers in rural Africa to sell the fruits of their land to Wall Street and Silicon Valley – not via commodities markets, but via the carbon credit markets, and we’re using these carbon markets to finance the regeneration of depleted soils and ecosystems for subsistence farmers in developing regions,” said Darryl J. Nicke II, co-founder and CEO of Carbon Capture Shield, Inc.
Their project will generate carbon-free energy, provide fresh water, and even Starlink satellite internet to the remote area over the course of 30 years, all while recharging local aquifers, stabilizing local weather patterns, and rewarding farmers for learning and practicing good land stewardship practices. Carbon offsets sought by multinational firms as part of the UN and IPCC goals for carbon neutrality by 2030 will support all of this.
“We’ve spent the last several years helping to pioneer agri-solar in Japan, and we’re ready to expand into Kenya, Malawi, Albania, Scotland, United Kingdom, United States, Colombia, Australia; and more are reaching out to us every day,” said Steffen Studeny, Co-Founder of Carbon Capture Shield and Executive Chairman of WQ, Inc. “The XPRIZE Carbon Removal Milestone Award would supercharge our work by directly funding it on a commercial scale in regions that desperately need assistance.”
“The goal of this CO2 Removal XPRIZE is to turn ideas into demonstration, and turn powerpoint solutions into hardware,” said Peter H. Diamandis, founder and executive chairman of XPRIZE. “By launching the largest prize competition in history, our hope is to focus the brainpower of engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs around the world to build solutions that actually work, at low-cost and at massive scale.”
*The XPRIZE Carbon Removal competition, which began on Earth Day 2021 (the same day Carbon Capture Shield, Inc was formed), is a four-year global competition. The winning teams must demonstrate a functional solution at a size of at least 1,000 tonnes removed each year, model their costs at a scale of 1 million tonnes per year, and show a path to a scale of gigatonnes per year in the future to win the $50 million grand prize. A third party must validate all demonstrations.
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