Does CarbonABLE sell zero-risk investments?

Carbonable.io
3 min readJun 16, 2022

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Not if the forest burns down! CarbonABLE’s NFTs get their yield from real carbon credits, linked to real carbon sink restoration projects.

Playing fair — the carbon credits game

Has anyone found a zero-risk investment? Does that exist? Probably not. We’ll be the first to tell you, CarbonABLE is not a zero-risk investment. There is a very very small risk the forest burns down, or the wetland is destroyed during a strong storm.

The yield of the NFTs created by CarbonABLE is linked to the real-life progress of the natural carbon sinks we finance. If a reforestation project financed by CarbonABLE burns down, what happens? Well, we “burn,” or retire the carbon credit linked to that plot of forest. Once a carbon credit is burned, or retired, it doesn’t exist anymore. Does that mean our holders’ investments (and yields) are retired too?

Here’s how a carbonABLE NFT holder might be impacted by the forest or wetland being rendered unable to capture carbon:

NFT holder credit burning: scenario A

NFTs issued by CarbonABLE are not carbon credits themselves but represent a certain area of a natural carbon sink that has been restored. Carbon credits are released as the area captures carbon in real time. And the holder’s yield comes from the carbon credits owned and traded by CarbonABLE. So would CarbonABLE ever retire a credit for the sake of an NFT holder? Yes!

If the plot of land represented by the NFT is damaged, flooded, or the trees burn or die, CarbonABLE cannot keep trading the credits associated with that plot. It’d be cheating. We retired those credits.

But does that mean the holder would lose their yield? Not quite. Each project has a mandatory buffer zone to ensure our holders a yield even if some areas are damaged.

This is a fixed area of carbon sink that is set aside as a buffer — kind of like an emergency reserve. The carbon credits it emits are reserved to be traded only if they’re needed to replace retired credits. If the area of your NFT is damaged, you’ll receive the equivalent yields of the buffer zone’s carbon credits.

NFT holder credit burning: scenario B

But…what if the whole forest burns down and there is no more buffer zone? First of all, losing a whole project would be very, very rare. CarbonABLE and our partner Wildsense have extremely stringent project screening processes and monitoring systems in place to avoid it.

But let’s say it did happen.

Well, like above, we have to retire all the credits. But we don’t want our holders to lose their investment on something they cannot control; that doesn’t seem fair. That’s why in the future, we’ll be offering decentralized insurance to insure your credits against catastrophic events. This insurance will be available for a certain number of CARBZ$, our token, and will protect your yield, even if the forest goes up in smoke.

Holding the voluntary carbon market accountable

All this to create a better, more transparent voluntary carbon credit market. At CarbonABLE we believe we can leverage DeFi to make a big impact in high-quality climate mitigation. We’ve built a team of experts in climate, blockchain, and carbon trading to make this mission become reality. We haven’t created a zero-risk investment. But we have created one that is low-risk, high-reward for investors and the future of the planet.

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