Conclusion

The Toha system is designed as trusted infrastructure to facilitate collaboration on urgent challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss. It is designed to facilitate reciprocity, to redistribute the value that data generates as it is shared and used. It is designed to be adaptive and self-organising, and therefore to evolve in light of new knowledge and changing circumstances. Finally, it is designed to build and sustain trust – through elevating relationships, suitably managing risks, and extending opportunities to create and share value.

Accordingly, the Toha system is an expression of an investment logic, rather than the grant-giving logic which prevails in community development and nature conservation today. However, this is not an investment logic which is constrained by conventional expectations of financial risk and return. Rather, it consummates a holistic conception of return-on-investment which (in addition to financial returns) includes access to digital infrastructure, data rights, governance rights, and human dignity and wellbeing. For companies, these non-financial returns are nevertheless material: for example, environmental data is critical for product differentiation, market access, brand preservation, and social licence to operate. But the ultimate standard of value for the Toha system is the measurable impact on environmental and social outcomes that people create by individual and collective efforts.

The substantiation of this integrated value will address a significant gap in existing markets. As such, Toha exemplifies an interstitial strategy which plays in the gaps within current economic structures – in the windows of opportunity – to grow something new.¹³ To an extent, this may remedy the shortcomings of those structures and waylay the onset of crisis and collapse. Specifically, the Toha system may facilitate investment into nature – into carbon storage, biodiversity uplift, climate risk reduction, and more – which enables existing markets to mitigate the environmental harms that are undermining their capacity for long-term prosperity.

However, Toha’s market infrastructure need not be operationalised in accordance with the prevailing economic logic of today. As digital public infrastructure, as ‘shared means to many ends’,¹⁴ the Toha system can serve a variety of market logics, including those that differ significantly from the markets we are familiar with today. It can also be an instrument of the state or of civil society, no less than business. As such, this white paper is not exhaustive of the possible applications of the Toha system to address grand challenges. This openness is an invitation to human creativity and the potential for digital infrastructure to contribute to the greatest challenges of our time – for the sake of ourselves, our children, and our children’s children.

Not without trust