A NOVEL AND SCALABLE SAAS PLATFORM WITH LOW-TECH AND HIGH-TECH ACCESS POINTS TO SIMULTANEOUSLY DRIVE GREENHOUSE GAS REDUCTIONS, PROMOTE RURAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, AND ENHANCE THE ENVIRONMENT

Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions are linked to negative agricultural, health, and environmental impacts. Rural America has a unique opportunity to reach the White House's carbon net-zero (CNZ) goals by 2030, 2040, and 2050 [1]. However, economic challenges, poverty, health epidemics, and climate change stand in the way. Driving reductions to GHG, set within a framework to achieve economic development, has the potential to simultaneously reduce negative impacts to health, enhance the environment, and address the socioeconomic challenges facing families and rural communities [2].The problem is that the digital infrastructure is lacking. Existing digital infrastructures, namely for communication and commerce, have been dominated by popular social media and search engines to generate profits with ratings-based advertising business models rather than enabling market-driven forces to align with economic development and achieve sustainable development goals--placing excess burden on communities and state/local governments/taxpayers to mitigate the problem. For example eroding advertising revenues increasingly forces local newspapers to close, which fractures communities who lack balanced journalistic reporting [3]. Other negative impacts are the mounting evidence of social isolation, mental health issues, and lost economic opportunity [4-8]. Federal data privacy regulations are limit internet-based tracking devices used to generate ~$1,610bn in revenue for these companies since 2010 [9-10]. The regulations create a vital opportunity for tech that is developed and deployed to address rural economic development.With patented and patent-pending technology, Universal Schedule and Booking (USB) proposes R&D for machine learning to power a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model to drive rural economic development while simultaneously protecting the environment and addressing climate change.The goal of this Phase I study is to determine the feasibility of a rural community-level stakeholder platform software interface to an incentive/reward/subsidy payment system to drive building decarbonization for rural communities with low-tech and/or high-tech software application (app) accesspoints.