United Nations displays NFT art to highlight climate crisis

The United NationsIts winners were displayed nonfungible token(NFT), climate initiative called DigitalArt4 Climate

The UN-led NFT Climate Initiative presented the results of its art climate initiative during the United Nations Climate Change Conference (also known as COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland.

The UN-Habitat group partnered with Unique Network, IAAI GLOCHA, and Exquisite Workers on the DigitalArt4Climate initiative.

The initiative was intended to empower artists, activists, and designers worldwide to create digital artwork that will inspire people around the world to take action against the climate crisis. It also introduced them worldwide to NFTs, a technology which has the potential to liberate artists by allowing them the opportunity to monetize work in ways that were not possible before.

NFTs use blockchain technology to authenticate digital items. This has given life to digital art that can now be auctioned based on rarity. After hundreds upon hundreds of submissions and tens to thousands of votes, the winners and three sub-themes were selected.

Above: Allegory for survival

Image Credit: Unique Network

The digital artist Bricx Martillo Dumas, who hails from the Philippines, has been declared the winner of the DigitalArt4Climate art  competition, with his piece Nexus. Dumas’ artwork depicts a hand holding a blue-colored drink in a plastic bag with a straw, and a cigarette whose smoke evaporates into tiny leaves. Dumas is the sole finalist from Southeast Asia, out of over 200 submissions from 58 countries. Dumas will receive 1500 euros ($1,721) as a prize for winning the competition.

The second place winners include Amir Karimi’s Every Second: Lake (Iran), Ekaterina Lestienne’s The Wildfire (France), and Chloe Hajjar’s Allegory of Survival (USA). Each of these runners-ups will be awarded $574.

Unique Network is a leader in the blockchain sustainability space, developing sustainable NFTs that don’t use carbon-intensive networks such as Ethereum.

“We are excited to show that the ethos of distributed ledger technologies and open data can be used to support change agents to be more empowered in identifying climate actions they can make,” said Alexander Mitrovich, CEO of Unique Network. “Unique Network is extremely proud to be collaborating with these key United Nations initiatives, the global body for challenging paradigms and ensuring equitability, for a just transition. We believe that the future of human expression will be through NFTs, and we are dedicated to showing the whole world how it can unite our disparate communities in the fight to save our planet.”

Above: The Wildfire Lestienne

Image Credit: Unique Network

To recognize creativity’s power as a resource for sustainable development, the United Nations declared 2021 the Year of Creative Economy for Sustainable Development.

DigitalArt4Climate is a multi-stakeholder, unprecedented initiative that uses eco-friendly Blockchain technology to convert art into digital assets.

Unique Network is an infrastructure to support the next generation NFTs. The first NFT chain for Kusama and Polkadot, Unique Network offers developers independence from high network transaction fees, dense upgrades, and siloed NFTs. To expand NFT use cases and increase usability, the Unique Network team has partnered up with many NFT projects, including UN-Habitat, UN-Habitat, Art Curator Grid, XP Network and SupraOracles. Unique Network was responsible for Polkadot’s first NFTs, Substrapunks.