5.1 Food Futures
Food Futures brings anti-rivalry to your dinner table, while combating climate change. A sustainable consumption action – in this case, a green meal selection – creates climate benefits for everyone on the planet. And the more benefits there are, the more efficiently climate change is mitigated.
How is this anti-rival?
By encouraging sustainable meal consumption, the Food Futures project generates positive outcomes for the entire planet. To put it simply: more people taking part in Food Futures = more conscious and sustainable eating = reduced contributions to climate change.
The challenge in the Food Futures case is how to steer micro-actions toward sustainable choices. Micro-actions are “actions so small, so easy, that they hardly feel worth doing” (The New York Times).
To this end, the system uses token rewards. Think of a token as a permanent digital reward, like a medal you receive at the end of a race. Each token represents and celebrates an action from a community member, signifying the anti-rival value they have added to the community.
Tokens are minted (or made) when positive externalities are measured and recorded. The tokens indelibly and permanently recognize individuals’ contributions toward achieving lower emissions. The tokens have an infinite supply, as climate benefits won’t “wear out.” The reward system is also compatible with Elinor Ostrom’s principles of managing common pool resources, as described in the earlier section of this MOOC.
This project highlights how individual choices matter when it comes to the tragedy of the environmental commons – a common pool resource that nobody owns, but everyone and everything depends on. The real challenge is to convince each and every one of us that what they bring to the table matters as, with the tragedy of the commons, cooperation and trust in everyone else contributing as well are the keys to the change. Free-riding is irrelevant if you know for sure that everyone else is working for the same desired goal.
Watch the video to see more details. It elaborates on how to achieve a 2.1 degrees C lifestyle and collective governance of our climate commons with applied data science and analytic reasoning. The underlying principle is that what is good for all of us, is good for each of us — anti-rivalry in action!
