Sponsor Profile: Next Earth

Next Earth is the only blockchain-based virtual land ownership platform on the exact copy of Earth. People can purchase tiles of land or water, add artwork to them, hold or resell the tiles, make a profit, also, be part of an active community. The platform also welcomes business providers to expand the available service opportunities.
Next Earth is a metaverse that is dedicated to make our world a better place with the help of a virtual one. Launched in September 2021, the company has already donated more than US $1 million towards environmental causes and has more than 230,000 registered users on the platform. They even launched their own token, called NXTT.

A part of every transaction occurring on the Next Earth ecosystem including land sales are put into a fund that provides financial support for environmental charities including SEE Turtles. Through August 2022, Next Earth has provided more than US $112,000 in donations from their monthly DAO votes. These funds have supported:

  • Our Sea Turtles & Plastic Program, including the following projects:

    • CIMAD (Colombia): the funds will be used to train 5 families in a remote coastal community on the Pacific coast to weave waste plastic shopping bags into attractive handbags that will be sold to travelers and others

    • COBEC (Kenya): the funds will be used to conduct monthly beach cleanups that will collect an estimated 400 kg per event, an educational campaign to reduce the production of plastic waste, and new equipment to be used to recycle the collected waste into products whose sales will benefit 30 local families.

    • EcoMayto (Mexico): This project works with 5 communities along the Pacific coast to collect plastic that would be burned and to keep plastic off of turtle nesting beaches. This support allows EcoMayto to invest in equipment that will double the plastic recycled on site, making kids chairs, roof tiles, and other products.

    • Karumbe (Uruguay): that will clean several tons of plastic from coastlines and provide opportunities to recycle that waste and receive funding to support their turtle rehabilitation work.

    • Juara Turtle Project (Malaysia): With these funds, Juara is upgrading their machinery to enable additional onsite plastic waste recycling and improve the recycling center infrastructure to be able to keep up with the supply of plastic waste collected from Tioman island.

    • Fundacao Principe (Principe Island): This grant will support the collection and repurposing of plastic that is washed ashore on main the nesting beach of the island, recycling plastic flip-flops into jewelry and plastic bags into rugs and with the production of reusable menstrual pads reducing as well the local use of disposable products and supporting menstrual poverty eradication.

  • Our Billion Baby Turtles Program, including the support for the following organizations that work to protect important turtle nesting beaches around the world:

    • Mar Alliance: A previously unprotected nesting beach in Panama that will protect critically endangered hawksbill turtles.

    • Sea Turtles Forever (Costa Rica): An important nesting beach for Eastern Pacific green turtles on the Pacific coast.

    • Pamali (Indonesia): Supports work to protect 850 nests per year of green and hawksbill sea turtles

    • Provita (Venezuela): A turtle nesting beach that releases an average of 8,000 hawksbill hatchlings per season

    • Sea Turtle Conservancy (Panama): A major leatherback nesting beach on the northern Pacific coast

    • Local Ocean Co (Kenya): One of Africa’s important green turtle nesting beaches

    • Save The Turtles of Parismina (Costa Rica): A community-run leatherback conservation project on the Caribbean coast

    • Latin American Sea Turtles (Costa Rica): Working to protect the turtles nesting on one of the country’s most important hawksbill nesting beaches

  • Our Too Rare To Wear program which works to end the illegal trade in tortoiseshell products which come from critically endangered hawskbill turtles, including:

    • Helping to finalize the SEE Shell App, which will be the first phone app to use machine learning to ID illegal wildlife products (launching soon). This app will help to address the illegal tortoiseshell trade in many places around the world, allowing shoppers, government officials, and researchers to recognize these products.

    • Funds also support outreach campaigns in key hotspots including outreach workshops on the tortoiseshell trade in Panama, Costa Rica, and Indonesia.