Eight billion hours of care, and a protocol to make them count

Someone walked an ancestral trail this morning, observing the presence of nature. Someone counted seedlings. Someone sat with a river and noticed it had changed. None of that work generated an invoice, and almost none of it appears in a national contribution account.

The 8 Billion Hour Pledge starts from a simple premise: caring for nature is work. The campaign aims to register, verify and fund eight billion hours of community work for nature by 31 December 2030, and to build the plumbing that lets that work be recognised and paid for rather than assumed to be free.

IEG is pleased to confirm that its flagship campaign session, “8 Billion Hour Pledge: Open Consultation on the 8BH Protocol”, has been approved for the COP17 Green Zone in Yerevan.

An open consultation means an open consultation

The session introduces the first iteration of the 8BH Protocol. It is a first iteration in the honest sense: incomplete, open to challenge, and considerably better off for being argued with in a room containing community representatives, financiers and standard-setters at the same time. Four pillars are on the table.

• Governance and integrity. Who holds the pen, and what stops a protocol built for communities from drifting away from them.
• Indigenous data sovereignty. Territorial data safeguarded under the CARE, TRUST and FAIR principles, with consent as a live permission rather than a signature collected once.
• Digital public infrastructure. Community-led verification layers for groundtruthing and monitoring, designed so the verifying is done by the people who were there.
• Regional case studies. A feature announcement on regional baselining.

If you think the protocol gets something wrong, this is the session to say so. Join us in the COP17 Green Zone.

IEG acknowledges the support of Toha Network in the development of the 8 Billion Hour Pledge.

Image: Tree planting project, Kaduna State by Abike25, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.