Polygon Is Going Carbon Negative in 2022 With a $20 Million Pledge

Today marks the start of a new, sustainable era for the Polygon ecosystem -- the core team has committed to eliminating all of the network’s carbon debt going back to inception and making the chain climate positive into the future.

Polygon’s Green Manifesto announced today is part of a broader vision for sustainable development that includes the plan to achieve carbon-negative status in 2022. Polygon is also creating a climate offset vertical within its ecosystem and has pledged $20 million to a series of community initiatives, including funding projects that utilize technology to combat climate change.

As the first step, Polygon is buying $400,000 worth of high-quality and traceable BCT and MCO2 carbon credits, the equivalent of roughly 90,000 tons of CO2 emissions. Polygon will then selectively retire the offsets within the carbon token pools that meet the highest standards for additionality and positive environmental impact.

Polygon is partnering with KlimaDAO, a decentralized collective of environmentalists, developers, and entrepreneurs, widely recognised as the most high-profile proponent of facilitating the nascent on-chain carbon market. Polygon will purchase the credits via KlimaDAO's on-chain carbon market, Klima Infinity, and retire them using its offset aggregator decentralized app.

All BCT and MCO2 tokenized credits were created from offsets certified under the Verified Carbon Standard, one of many independent standards endorsed by the International Carbon Reduction and Offset Alliance (ICROA), a key industry body setting best practices and ensuring environmental integrity within the voluntary carbon market.

KlimaDAO will also analyze Polygon network's energy footprint and support its emission management and mitigation strategy. The analysis will include emissions from staking node hardware, energy consumption of staking operations, and contracts directly interacting with Ethereum mainnet. Polygon has also commissioned the Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute (CCRI) to audit its carbon footprint.

Polygon's sustainability pledge comes ahead of Ethereum's transition to a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism, which will reduce the network's energy consumption by almost 99 percent. After Ethereum's transition to PoS and the completion of CCRI analysis, Polygon will move beyond carbon neutrality to attain the carbon negative status.

Polygon is already the leading scaling solution for Ethereum with a suite of products that includes Polygon PoS, Polygon Edge and Polygon Avail. The team is also investing in cutting-edge zero knowledge (ZK) technology that will be key to onboarding the next billion users to Web3. This commitment to sustainability also puts the team at the forefront of responsible blockchain development.

"Our outlined measures may eliminate the emissions of the Polygon ecosystem, but that's not enough to effect the kind of change needed to combat the climate crisis at scale," said Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon. "Together with Polygon, the broader blockchain industry needs to form a united front to fund, support, and leverage technology that helps heal the earth, rather than destroy it."

Learn more about our sustainability activities here and tune into the blog for the latest news from Polygon.

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