United Nations shows off NFT art highlighting climate crisis

The United Nations showed off the winners of its nonfungible token (NFT) climate initiative called DigitalArt4 Climate.

The UN-led NFT Climate Initiative showed off the results of its art climate initiative at 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 aimed to empower artists, designers, and activists worldwide to create digital art that will inspire people worldwide to take action against the climate crisis, while concurrently introducing them to NFTs, a technology that has the ability to liberate artists globally by allowing them to monetize their work in ways that have not been possible before.

NFTs use the security and transparency of blockchain to authenticate unique digital items, and that has given new life to digital art, which can now be auctioned off based on rarity. After hundreds of submissions worldwide, and tens of thousands of votes on the art pieces themselves, one winner and three sub-theme winners have been selected.

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. Out of over two hundred who submitted from 58 countries, Dumas is the only finalist from Southeast Asia. Dumas will be awarded 1500 euros ($1,721) 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 runner-ups will receive $574.

Unique Network is taking a leading role in the blockchain sustainability space by developing sustainable NFTs that do not use carbon-intensive networks like 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.”

The United Nations announced 2021 as the Year of Creative Economy for Sustainable Development to recognize the value of creativity as a powerful resource for sustainable development and climate action.

The DigitalArt4Climate is an unprecedented multi-stakeholder initiative that uses eco-friendly blockchain technology to turn art into digital assets or clean NFTs, which can be collected and traded, thus opening up a socio-technological innovation space that helps to unlock extraordinary potential for resource mobilization and climate empowerment.

Unique Network is an infrastructure for the next generation of NFTs. The first NFT chain for Kusama and Polkadot, Unique Network offers developers independence from high network transaction fees, dense upgrades, and siloed NFTs. The Unique Network team has partnered with numerous NFT projects in order to deepen the integrations needed to expand NFT use cases and usabilities, like Art Curator Grid, XP Network, UN-Habitat, and SupraOracles. Unique Network was responsible for Polkadot’s first NFTs, Substrapunks.