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This is a proposal for a new Special Interest Group. We encourage you to get involved with the group if the goals and scope sound interesting to you. Anyone is welcome to participate – all you need to do is add your name in the Interested Parties section below and we will follow up with you with next steps as soon as the group is launched. In order to edit this page, you will need to get a free Linux Foundation ID and then you can log in here and add your name below. If you have questions or need help, contact David Boswell. |
Distributed ledgers to deliver transparency and accountability under the Paris Agreement and accelerate urgent action
Introduction
Climate change is recognized globally as both a crisis and an opportunity requiring transformational change to attain sustainable societies and economies. Urgent action at a global scale is crucially important to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement (i.e. UN global climate accord) and avoid irreversible ecosystem damage at a planetary scale. Concerted action is often fraught with mistrust and lack of transparency among the scope of actors (countries, subnational governments, companies, individuals) due to uncertainty of distributed responsibilities and clashing incentives at the short-term level. Whilst the Paris Agreement is a globally encompassing framework to prevent warming above 1.5oC (relative to pre-industrial levels), it still lacks a clear mechanism enabling actors to ‘speak the same language’ when recording climate-relevant data and verified actions. Distributed ledger technology (DLT) and other emerging digital solutions have the potential to provide trusted record-keeping processes, data consensus and rules automation —crucially needed components in order to align actors, accelerate mitigation and adaptation action and mobilize the trillions of dollars of finance required annually.
Hyperledger’s ecosystem and DLTs are central to the creation of a global and open climate accounting system that helps integrate all actors and actions under the same planetary goal. The Hyperledger frameworks and the Linux Foundation’s know how and team supporting them are essential for the development and function of an open source and decentralized climate accountability network that both operationalizes transparency (i.e. Article 13 of the Paris Accord) whilst enhancing a participant’s actor’s personal privacy, security and control.
The proposed Climate Action & Accounting (CA2) special interest group (SIG) will foster and engage a multi-stakeholder network to exchange ideas, needs and resources in order to develop and consolidate open source DLT solutions for a common climate accounting mechanism and frameworks.
Climate action is a broadly encompassing term that involves all climate relevant actions (e.g. policies, programs, technologies, goods, services…) taken by actors (e.g. states and non-state actors such as businesses, cities, individuals…) ; from —from emission generating activities, to the broad set of actions encompassed within climate mitigation and adaptation and its associated finance mechanisms.
Climate accounting, on the other hands, is referred here as the encompassing term that involves all processes of recording climate relevant information/data; from the physical state of the planet, to the list of all climate actors, their broad set of climate actions and agreements in respect to the shared account of the climate challenge. Whilst climate action occurs in the real world, climate accounting is (or should be) recorded in the digital world. This SIG will help build the relationship between both and consolidate technological tools to do so.
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The scope of the SIG is defined by the terms climate action and climate accounting defined in the introduction as encompassing and complementary concepts and illustrated below. The SIG will be organized around 5 climate domains outlined in the attached diagram: Earth system state, World system registries, Climate action certification, Networked climate markets, Climate finance.
Scope not within Charter:
Whilst this special interest group will consider the role of supply chains in climate accounting, these will be considered generally but not in depth so as to not overlap with more supply chain specific groups at Hyperledger. Furthermore, this interest group involves all matters of climate change but does not encompasses other aspects of sustainability (e.g. biodiversity, non-greenhouse gas pollutants, socioeconomic inequalities etc.).
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Proposed Co-Chairs
Martin E. Wainstein , PhD and Tom Baumann are proposed to serve as co-chairs.
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