Introducing Toha's digital public infrastructure

The Toha Network is building digital infrastructure to accelerate cross-sector collaboration on climate and environment challenges.

Jul 23, 2024

Collaboration is vital if we are to rise to the challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss. But – with trust as fragile as it is – we cannot take collaboration for granted, especially at the pace and scale required.

We need to build the infrastructure for greater collaboration – across public, private and community sectors. We need purpose-built systems to enable greater levels of coordination, orchestration and capability-sharing than would otherwise occur.

The Toha system is digital public infrastructure for a new era of collaboration. It is part of the ‘missing market infrastructure’ which connects frontline communities with investors in climate action and nature regeneration.

Toha’s digital infrastructure has three pillars (discussed in detail below):

A measurement platform which uses impact data technologies to track actions and outcomes.
A data sharing network for the secure and sovereign exchange of impact data.
A payment system that enables participants to pay for, and be paid for, impact data.

This explainer describes how these pillars constitute an integrated, high-integrity system that bridges the gap between supply and demand for action on climate and nature.

What is digital public infrastructure?

Digital public infrastructure (DPI) is, like any infrastructure, a shared means to many ends. As public infrastructure, it is available to everyone to pursue the kind of lives they value.

In August 2023, in a rare moment of consensus among G20 countries under India’s Presidency, DPI was defined as: ‘a set of shared digital systems that should be secure and interoperable, and can be built on open standards and specifications to deliver and provide equitable access to public and/or private services at societal scale and are governed by applicable legal frameworks and enabling rules to drive development, inclusion, innovation, trust, and competition and respect human rights and fundamental freedoms.’

In practice, this includes digital payment systems; data sharing systems, credentials, and models; verifiable identity and registries; digital signatures and consents; and discovery and fulfillment systems that enable access to goods and services via open protocols/APIs. So, this isn’t the hardware of fibre optic cables, servers and data centres – that’s infrastructure-for-data. This is data-as-infrastructure, an emerging layer of programming and standards that enable new functions and possibilities for improved human wellbeing.

This might sound complicated, but most of us already use digital infrastructure on a daily basis, whether it’s online payments, cloud storage, or Google and Apple IDs. But what we mostly use is private infrastructure, built by companies for proprietary use.

What DPI promises – and this relates to the ‘P’ for public – is to harness this digital innovation for solving big public problems. The Toha Network – an ecosystem of ventures, impact investors, scientists and communities – is using these novel technological opportunities to create an infrastructure system with three interlocking pillars.

Pillar one: The measurement platform

Measurement makes data. The higher the quality of the measurement, the higher the quality of the data. This is important when we rely on data to make high-stake decisions about, say, a family business or ancestral whenua. We need to be able to place our trust in the data.

Data can also help us to place our trust in others. We can use data for verification, for assessing claims that others want us to believe. In business, claims are assertions that describe, distinguish or promote a product, process, business, service or action with respect to its social, environmental or financial attributes or credentials. In respect to nature and climate change, an organisation might make:

a reporting claim – that is, a claim of climate- or nature-aligned attributes which already exist within a company’s value chain.
a contribution claim – that is, a claim of contribution to a local or global target by causing impact beyond the company’s own value chain.
a compensation claim – that is, a claim that an unabated harm within a company’s value chain is compensated for by investing in an inversely equivalent impact.

To ensure high integrity, Toha claims are formalised as claim templates. These are reproducible, science-based, digital templates which guide the user through the measuring, monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) of actions and outcomes. This produces a data asset that can be accessed by organisations for the purpose of making claims like those above. The proceeds of sales for data access can then be allocated to those who created the data – that is, the frontline communities who are taking action and reporting its impact.

The Toha system also facilitates pledges. These are a type of ex ante commitment claim that a target or desired state will be achieved in time. In practice, a Toha pledge is a commitment to specific activities and milestones, as well as the collection and reporting of relevant data. Pledges are a digital contract which can facilitate the upfront financing of activities and data collection, and therefore enable investors to make robust claims on subsequent actions and outcomes.

To ensure that the measurement templates for Toha’s claims and pledges are high quality and usable, Toha mobilises the involvement of subject matter experts in a marketplace. Template developers receive royalties for the use of their templates over time, which creates the incentives for integrity, usability and needs alignment fit. This also leaves the door open to different forms of knowledge, whether conventional Western science, Indigenous knowledge, or innovative measurement approaches.

Pillar two: The data sharing network

Data is valuable. Its value is realised through use and reuse – by being shared, analysed, converted, interpreted, and incorporated into decision making. The more open the data is, the easier it is to access and create use from. When we share data with each other, we can build more insights about the value we have generated both individually and collectively. This is especially critical when it comes to climate and nature.

However, there are risks associated with open data. This includes conventional concerns about privacy, but also more novel challenges such as the appropriation and exploitation of data by intermediaries or third parties. If such risks are realised, this can cause direct harms to people. Indirectly, it can also produce a backlash against openness, which undermines the capacity of data to generate public value.

This is why data sovereignty is central to Toha’s system, not only for states but also groups and individuals. To have sovereignty is, in part, to have influence over the data that one has special claims to, especially data that relates to oneself and one’s relations to other people, places and organisations. This is a general right, but one with special relevance for those, such as Indigenous landowners and communities, whose sovereignty is endangered by past and present processes of colonisation. It is also critical for those who carry outsized risks in the global food system such as farmers, landowners and rural communities. For this reason, the Toha system positions data sovereignty as the minimum operational requirement for any market-based economy aiming to recognise and reward stewardship of nature.

The tokenisation of data – that is, the process of substituting data into digital assets with unique identifiers – can enhance sovereignty in a data economy. Digital tokens can be self-custodial and programmable. This enables control over how data is used and for what purpose, even as it circulates within a data economy. It also cryptographically protects against interference and censorship by third parties. Thus, digital tokens enable the operationalisation of data sovereignty by empowering data creators to give or withhold consent over its future use, and thereby to exercise influence in the data economy.

One aspect of data sovereignty is the power to benefit from one’s own data. That power cannot be taken for granted these days: data is frequently expected of upstream businesses without compensation, or appropriated by very large online platforms that track our engagement on the internet. However, data sovereignty creates the opportunity for data creators to demand that benefits are shared. When this data economy relates to climate action and nature-based work, this benefit-sharing can unlock much-needed funding for the frontline communities making real-world impact. This deepens the reciprocity of the data economy, which ensures that prosperity is widely shared.

Pillar three: The impact payment system

The final pillar is an impact payment system to facilitate the funding and financing of impact. This is an important practical component of the Toha system: firstly to facilitate grants, debt and equity for impact; and secondly to establish a data economy that enables the value of data to be realised and shared fairly among relevant parties.

Digital token technology underpins Toha’s impact payment system to enable the integrated exchange of data and value. In its initial phase, Toha is using a dual-token system of MAHI and TOHA (see this post for detail).

The MAHI token represents a unit of funded work in service to nature and climate. By purchasing units, the buyers of MAHI are securely releasing funds for verifiable frontline action – that is, the actual work of repairing and restoring nature, and responding to climate change. The TOHA token generates rights to data and governance in the Toha system. Holders use TOHA to pay the transaction fees to access, use and share the data that is necessary for the operation of the impact payment system.

This dual-token system enables participants to pay for, and be paid for, impact data – which in turn unlocks new sources of funding for the impact that that data represents. Critically, it significantly reduces the transaction costs of funding frontline action, which makes it easier to convert will into action.

In te reo Māori, the word mahi refers to work, labour, performance and accomplishment. The word toha refers to distribution, allocation, and spreading around. By bringing MAHI and TOHA together in a token economy, Toha is designing for a more balanced distributive model between the providers of capital and the providers of labour.

Next steps

The Toha system has emerged, and will continue to emerge, in an evolving process.

The Toha Network spent its first phase in deep R&D and system design. This concluded with this open proposal for an interconnected system of measurement, data sharing and payments described above.

We have already built several key components of the infrastructure necessary to demonstrate and test collaboration in the Toha system, end-to-end. However, a significant programme of future investment and work is necessary to ensure the infrastructure can scale globally to support the diversity of communities, regions and markets, including new trading markets.

The next steps for the Toha Network are:

Assemble and announce the platform advisory group;
Publish an open platform roadmap for Toha’s digital public infrastructure;
Continued fundraising to rally diverse contributions of tech and teams to deliver key milestones on the roadmap.

In the near future, there will be many open calls for collaboration to deliver the platform. A team is assembling to explore the best structures for ongoing technology investment in the public interest. Be sure to follow Toha’s LinkedIn page and future newsletters to stay across further announcements.