Utilizing fungi, MycoHab transforms the problematic blackthorn encroacher bush, a significant contributor to desertification and the depletion of water and wildlife refuges in Namibia, into valuable resources. This effort has been created through a partnership between Standard Bank Group, Standard Bank, Namibia, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT’s) Label Free Research Group inside the Centre for Bits and Atoms, and US-based architecture firm redhouse studio to scale NASA developed technology. Learn more about this partnership here.
Mission
Integrate a unique ecological approach with cutting-edge sustainability practices to address critical environmental challenges while paving the way for groundbreaking construction, affordable housing, and sustainable food sourcing solutions.
Carbon Project Integrity
The Guardian Ecosystem enables ALLCOT to create a standardized project development framework that fosters trust, transparency and compatibility across all project stakeholders. This ensures the creation of high-integrity projects while maximizing benefits for local communities.
The Guardian Ecosystem facilitates the fulfillment of methodology standards, validation body requirements, project developer needs, and community expectations, thereby enhancing the overall efficiency and transparency of the project
ALLCOT stakeholders benefit from access to accurate and comprehensive information on Hedera Guardian’s public ledger, leveraging a common set of rules and standards, fostering trust and accountability.
Transparently demonstrating how project resources are allocated on the public ledger enables ALLCOT’s stakeholders to comprehend the full scope of a project's efforts, flow of funds, and impact.
By recording the transaction cost at every stage of a project's progress, resulting carbon credits can be priced to maximize revenue distribution back to the local community.
By utilizing Hedera Guardian’s digital ledger, ALLCOT is able to minimize accounting errors, make auditing more open and efficient, and enable a more equitable emergence of verification and validation partners.
The Hedera Guardian Ecosystem establishes a secure chain of data custody, particularly in the case of drone-captured information for origination purposes. This enables ALLCOT to ensure that all project data remains intact, trustworthy and accurately tethered to each project attribute.
By ensuring that data provided aligns with the necessary frameworks, the Guardian helps meet specific industry needs and standards, while ensuring compliance with multiple reporting requirements.
ALLCOT is focused on creating products that surpass the limitations of conventional methods, shifting towards more advanced and efficient approaches to future sustainability markets.
The Guardian serves as a single source of truth, ensuring that policies and rules are standardized and compatible with other sustainability market actors. This enables ALLCOT to align financing through carbon forwards and the structuring of green bonds seamlessly across various entities within the ecosystem
The adoption of a common taxonomy within Guardian enables ALLCOT to establish a standardized language for discussing and addressing various sustainability issues. This fosters better communication and alignment for more effective and cohesive climate action.
By leveraging the flexibility and adaptability of Guardian, ALLCOT has the ability to provide various pathways for different stakeholders as the sustainability market evolves.
The Hedera Guardian Ecosystem operates as a common good, providing services to the entire ecosystem without an extractive fee-based model.
ALLCOT leverages the Hedera Guardian Ecosystem to build on and integrate various services and initiatives already established by other community members. This creates an aligned, streamlined ecosystem of sustainability market actors that avoids duplication to serve the needs of communities, investors, and project developers.
To achieve this, MycoHab leverages Hedera Guardian technology for transparency and accountability. By utilizing the methodologies that have been digitized in the Guardian, MycoHAB are developing carbon projects within the scope of the MycoHAB solutions set. The first stage will be setting up projects as digitized as carbon forwards, in the voluntary carbon market on the Evercity marketplace, to enable project finance and data traceability ahead of verification from traditional carbon market registries. The intent is to initially issue 4,999 credits following verification for the first project registered.
Case study: MycoHab in Namibia
The government of Namibia has identified the need to thin 300 million tons of biomass every 15 years to mitigate these environmental issues, with most solutions focusing on converting the biomass into charcoal or fuel pellets. In stark contrast, MycoHab employs a more sustainable approach by using the ground-up bush as a substrate for cultivating gourmet oyster mushrooms.
The by-product of this process, a mixture of encroacher bush and fungal mycelium, is then pressed and baked into robust building blocks. These blocks, which rival the compressive strength of concrete, effectively sequester carbon, with each 10kg block storing 15.7kg of CO2 equivalency, thereby contributing significantly to the fight against climate change. This has enabled MycoHab to build the world's first structural Mycelium building in Windhoek, Namibia. The business model of Mycohab is to create humanitarian housing for the 25% of Namibian that are homeless or living in informal settlements, "Shack Dwellers". This is paid for by carbon credit sales and sales of mushrooms.
This endeavor not only addresses the urgent need for sustainable building materials but also aligns with global sustainability goals, such as ensuring equitable sanitation and hygiene, integrating climate change measures into national policies, and striving for a land degradation-neutral world by 2030.
MycoHab contributes to several United Nations SDGs, notably:
- SDG 6.2: By significantly reducing water consumption in food production, MycoHab uses only 1% of the water needed for cattle farming and 10% for comparable vegetable farming.
- SDG 13.2: The project aids in integrating climate change measures into national policies by reducing the biomass that fuels wildfires, thus restoring grasslands that burn with less intensity.
- SDG 15.3: Through bush extraction, MycoHab combats desertification, helping to restore degraded lands and aiming for a land degradation-neutral world by 2030.
Environmental, Economic, and Social Co-Benefits:
- Planet: MycoHab's process not only sequesters carbon effectively but also contributes to combating desertification and restoring degraded lands in Namibia.
- People: The project is set to create numerous jobs, leveraging technology from MIT to introduce innovative building processes to the developing world, thereby supporting economic inclusion and decent work.
- Prosperity: MycoHab's model of using mushroom sales to fund humanitarian housing projects demonstrates a sustainable approach to addressing housing
MycoHab utilizes Hedera Guardian technology to digitize and enable monitoring, reporting, and verification (DMRV) using the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) Methodology AMS-III.Z.: Fuel Switch, process improvement, and energy efficiency in brick manufacture. This integration allows for precise tracking and verification of carbon storage and emission reductions, ensuring compliance with international standards and enhancing the project's transparency and credibility. The digital platform facilitates the sale of carbon credits by providing verifiable data on carbon sequestration, supporting the project's financial model and its contribution to global carbon reduction efforts.
The baseline scenario for the encroacher bush biomass involves conversion into charcoal or fuel pellets, processes that ultimately release stored carbon into the atmosphere. In contrast, MycoHab's building blocks offer a sustainable alternative, with each ton of produced blocks storing approximately 430kg of organic carbon. This innovative approach not only diverts biomass from less sustainable uses but also provides a tangible carbon storage solution, contributing to a net positive environmental impact.
MycoHab is proud to work with Hedera's ecosystem of partners:
