Kolektivo Curaçao
Kolektivo's first community economy, taking place on the Caribbean island of Curaçao
Last updated
Kolektivo's first community economy, taking place on the Caribbean island of Curaçao
Last updated
Kolektivo Curaçao is the first Kolektivo community economy. In this section, you can learn about the island and it specificities, as well as the context and past work that has lead to its launch.
Curaçao is a 444 km2 island nation located in the southern Caribbean. It houses close to 160,000 humans and thousands of other species — many of which are rare and endemic. The island is especially biodiverse, rimmed by fossilized coral reefs and fringed by mangroves. It houses hundreds of breeding and migratory bird species and several sea turtle nesting grounds.
Just like many others across the globe, Curaçao’s ecosystems are facing serious challenges. Sea level temperature increases have already caused widespread coral bleaching, rendering the island’s inhabitants more and more vulnerable to hurricanes. Overfishing has caused a 90% decline in catches between 1904 and 2006. Sea level rise threatens mangroves and erodes beaches. Despite international inaction, local scientists and volunteers are working towards protecting and restoring the wealth of Curaçaoan flora and fauna.
Kolektivo's roots in Curaçao come as far as 2018, during the Caribbean Blockchain Network. Since then, Kolektivo Curaçao has progressively evolved. Key historical elements are summed up below:
Kolektivo Curaçao recently published an Impact Report summing up the goals achieved in 2022. Examples include:
Organization of the Kolektivo Innovation Festival: The first-ever Caribbean innovation and sustainability festival
Opening of Kolab: An innovation hub and coworking space in the heart of the Otrobanda neighborhood
Publication of 8 research articles
Launch of the Kolektivo App
Funding of 40 Impact Grants
Support of 5 food-forest projects
One key specificity of the Kolektivo Curaçao community economy are its natural assets that will be tokenized to back the community’s currency — kGuilder. All of them are unique and crucial local ecosystems in urgent need of protection.
The first natural assets to be tokenized will be sustainable agroforests, or food-systems. Following this, the community economy’s attention will extend to include the island’s reefs and mangroves: two keystone habitats that provide critical ecosystem services to their surroundings.
The first natural assets to be tokenized are Kolektivo's food-systems, whose definition includes a wide range of sustainable agroforestry projects — from large scale projects inspired by the philosophy of syntropic agroforestry to permaculture gardens or small personal initiatives such as home gardens.
All of these food systems share the consensus that in order to be a regenerative way of producing food, the land must be managed with minimum disturbance of the soil, no use of chemicals and a robust water and waste management system in place.
The Kolektivo Agroforestry Standard — a type of agroforestry certification being developed by Kolektivo — will be applied in order to tokenize the food-system. Failure to meet the standard means a food-system in question cannot be fractionalized as Kolektivo ecological tokens.
In 2022, Kolektivo mapped the growing Curaçaoan network of sustainable agroforestry efforts. Close collaborations with existing projects have been forged. The knowledge gained over this year is currently being bundled and made accessible to all stakeholders in the Curaçao farming and reforestation community.
Coral reefs are crucial limestone skeleton formations that provide dozens of ecosystem services — from supporting the world’s densest concentration of marine biology to coastal erosion protection. Curaçao is surrounded by narrow fringing coral reefs, considered some of the most diverse and healthiest in the Caribbean. For a long time, these reefs supported the island’s fishing industry, and in recent decades, they have been a cornerstone of the tourism industry. However, almost half of the coral reef cover has vanished due to human pressures. To prevent these precious formations from decaying, restoration activities are required, some of which are today already supported by grants issued by Kolektivo Curaçao.
Following the same logic as food-systems, ecological state data produced from coral reefs will be tokenized as ecological tokens. The governance layer on top of this tokenization will initiate and improve the coordination of restoration and protection efforts. Thanks to the data collected from participatory environmental monitoring methods, the deployment of a parametric insurance mechanism becomes feasible as a means of protecting and restoring coral reefs.
Currently, Kolektivo has started collaborating with the OpenEarth Foundation to develop a Caribbean Reef management and monitoring methodology to produce Marine Ecosystem Credits and advanced credits to scale ocean conservation finance. This methodology has the potential of being used as standard allowing Kolektivo's coral reefs' tokenization.
Mangroves are a type of maritime marsh ecosystem consisting mainly of woody plants. They only develop in the tidal swing zone of tropical regions’ low coasts. Mangroves provide food security, coastal protection, carbon storage, and natural disaster risk mitigation benefits. They are nesting sites for birds and a wide range of marine species. The pressure on mangroves is alarming, as coastal mangrove areas are of great value to the tourism sector — a pillar of the economy for many tropical regions.
Following the same logic as food-systems and coral reefs, Mangroves will be the third ecological asset tokenized as ecological tokens to live within the Kolektivo Curaçao community economy. Kolektivo is already providing input on the Mangrove Methodology developed by OpenForest Protocol, which has the potential to be used as standard to allow Kolektivo's mangroves tokenization.
