# What is DrawDAO? ## Our Story ![](/files/b3G7XdOwFqXjojRej9d8) In a nutshell, DrawDAO is a community of carbon drawdown project operators, climate activists, scientists, and artists fighting climate change via the open-sourcing of carbon dioxide removal & storage (CDRS) methodologies and the pledging of funds to new and emerging CDRS projects. Our community was catalyzed in January 2022 by a group that has spent a long time thinking through how the average person can help move the needle on reversing climate change. One of our early team members had specifically been involved with a project in 2021 that was focused on growing kelp off the coast of Alaska in a fully automated way. Kelp happens to be one of the world's fastest growing organisms, and also a shockingly effective consumer of the molecule that we're all unfortunately too aware of -- CO2. After a successful pilot of this technology by a scientist in Seattle, this project failed to materialize the funding needed to keep going. This was one of the sparks that led to the inception of DrawDAO. This same member also happened to be involved with a successful NFT project earlier in 2022 that raised just shy of $400,000 in Ethereum (ETH) for the furthering of web3 education to the masses. After seeing the power that the next age of the internet can have on communities of people from all around the world overnight, the second spark was lit. ## Why Now? In general, according to the [oxford principles](https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/publications/reports/Oxford-Offsetting-Principles-2020.pdf) we should focus on reducing emissions as a global community first and foremost. The issue is that we cannot afford to focus on just this alone. We need to be removing somewhere on the order of 50+ billion tons of CO2 from our atmosphere per year to be able to be on a sustainable path for a climate that is not completely different in the very near future. Right now we're not even able to get to 50 million tons -- we need to scale carbon removal efforts up by 1000x over the next decade. Moral arguments and collective health of the globe aside, there are also currently not enough carbon credits out there to even sell -- that is, there aren't enough successful projects actively deployed -- not even close. To get to where we need to go, we're going to need to see a "[Cambrian explosion](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian_explosion)" of CDRS (carbon dioxide removal and sequestration) projects in the next few years. This is the core the DrawDAO mission. To marry the hype and success of an increasingly web3 world with the imperative to proliferate and multiply the carbon removal projects that are going to no less than ensure our specie's survival (on this planet) in the near future. ## Our Mission We're on a mission to drive awareness to, catalyze, and fund the creation of hundreds of new carbon drawdown projects. We plan to do this by **launching 12 unique NFT collections over 12 months** for each project we back -- with artwork commissioned by artists from frontline communities most affected by climate change. Projects will be betted by an [application process](https://drawdao.io/) that will include review by a panel of climate change scientists and legal experts. Each project will have to open source at least the main science behind how their technology works with the eventual goal of DrawDAO being able to create blueprints for anyone to replicate what is already a proven CDRS project/pathway. This is how we ultimately achieve our goal of creating hundreds of new drawdown projects. Our community will become the go-to for anyone looking to make a difference with climate change. A place where the average person can invest into tangible projects that they can track over time, and on which they can engage with real-life change-makers and operators. Regardless of funder status, community members will have access to tools and support to learn how to start their own carbon drawdown projects. ## Why a DAO? Community members of DrawDAO will at first be screened for interest and involvement in the general CDRS space to begin with. By using a DAO structure for our project, we obtain several benefits right out of the gate -- we can operate like a non-profit without all the paperwork (more below), we can take advantage of collective governance to grow and take action faster, and we can always make sure our mission is aligned with what the group wants, instead of just what a few desire to do. We'll be governed by a valueless ERC-20 token (DRW) that will allow us to collectively decide as a group which projects get funding, how to use treasury funds, and more. No single human will have the control to decide the fate of DrawDAO or the planet. We're structured as a nonprofit under the decentralized financial infrastructure of [Endaoment.org](https://endaoment.org/) -- the same group used for the successful raising of $40M in funds by the constitution DAO last year. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://drawdao.gitbook.io/welcome-to-gitbook/what-is-drawdao.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.