From the minds that brought you - none of that nonsense, we bring you something better. With a collection of reservoirs for biodiversity throughout Ireland that serve as the basis for premium, better designed ITMO that actually work to mitigate climate change by making it more viable for landowners to do the right thing.

With the transparency that blockchain technology provides we can scale the route to market for climate solutions that previously would never have been funded. Búan enables the scaling up of individuals private initiatives in a decentralised way.

Especially in Ireland a lot of marginal land paradoxically has some of the most promising potential for mitigating climate change. The peat soils hold the key to a wealth of habitats and landscapes that should be amongst the most valuable in the world for their potential to sequester CO2. Unlike other classes of ‘carbon sink type habitats’ such as the permafrost in the tundra over Russia that is thawing or the forests that are industrially optimised for growth but are actually terrible for biodiversity. Ireland has the potential for the greenest of bonds.

Conifer plantations are not just a ‘leaky’ means of carbon sequestration but have become such a victim of the measurement problem that all other outcomes of their optimisation is overlooked. Forests are part of our national heritage and it should be obvious that we need them to be living and breathing rather than plantations that aren’t good enough for anything other than pallet wood, toothpicks and fenceposts. Ireland does not produce structural timber unless you count the OSB in a sheer wall.

According to at least one research paper we have read from Science of the Total Environment the ‘potential for large losses of carbon from non-native conifer plantations on deep peat over decadal timescales’ what are potentially huge carbon sinks are being turned into net sources of carbon.

There are so many low hanging fruit that we could smash the climate targets with, just by changing things ever so slightly. Eliminate plantations that overlap with peatlands, manage peatlands so that they can once again start to sequester carbon (keep them wet, don’t plant on them at all). Stop putting windmills on peatlands, those sums work out much worse than you might think too.

Stop overgrazing our uplands and allow them to regenerate, create exclusion zones where browser species including deer can not get in and destroy new growth before it has the possibility to regenerate itself. Turn commonage over to the commons rather than sheep.

Under the prevailing m-o all of these possibilities are blown out of the water - not even by the market value but by the complacency carbon tunnel vision creates. But - what have we learned, we can correct the account using existing products and methodologies, supercharging them for meaningful impact.

Take the example of a conifer plantation on a raised bog habitat. First we need to create an exception in the law that would exempt them from being replanted every time that they are felled. Then leverage carbon avoidance accounting to demonstrate how many tonnes of carbon are being mediated from entering he atmosphere, then how much will be sequestered when the bog is rewetted and once again sequestering carbon.

Markets are meant to be forward pricing mechanisms but with mis-measurement of their potential they are useless in terms of serving the benefits they hold for society at large there has not even been a lot of research been done to empirically quantify the potential.

The lack of empirical evidence is partially down to the timescales involved in the forestry industry. As a reaction to post-war timber shortages, tax incentives and other measures encouraged the draining of peatlands for afforestation. Peatlands which were otherwise not financially viable became prime real estate because of changes in the underlying economics leading to mis-pricing of the eco-system services they provided.

Many of the initial plantations are today reaching the end of their first rotation from the 1980’s and we need to seize the opportunity to make sure that the mistakes of the past are not made endemic. The question now must be how to restore afforested peatlands in the best way possible.