In response to increasing awareness about climate change, more and more companies are now pledging to become Carbon Neutralcarbon neutral. A great example is Microsoft's initiative to become carbon neutral and eventually carbon negative. These initiatives often involve several steps, including:
- Audit of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions following the established Greenhouse Gas Protocol
- A plan for reducing the company's own emissions over time
- Purchasing carbon offsets to offset current emissions to achieve carbon neutrality. The offsets are should be often themselves certified by standards bodies such as the Gold Standard or Verified Carbon Standard.
- Obtaining a carbon neutrality certification from a certifying entity.
While these initiatives represent a significant step forward on climate change, there are many challenges for companies which embark on such paths. Most of these challenges center around the issues of data and trust. Fortunately, distributed ledger technology or blockchain, especially an open source platform like Hyperledger, are naturally designed to solve the problems of data and trust.
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A permissioned blockchain such as Hyperledger Fabric is designed could be used to address issues like this:
- A private channel could be set up for a company, its trusted data sources, and certifying entities.
- The data sources could include utilities, suppliers, shippers, and other sources that could supply data automatically about a company's activities. When the data is pulled from their data sources, they would be digitally signed to certify their sources. A hash of the data could also be stored for later verifying that the data has not been altered.
- One or more certifying entities could have access to the data and use smart contracts to calculate the company's emissions based on the data on the private channel.
- The result could then be signed and published to a more public place.blockchain, for example as a token.
Hyperledger Fabric channels and chain code allow additional parties to audit If there are questions of the audit process, then additional parties' smart contracts could be added to the channel so that they too could audit the emissions, while limiting who has access to a company's emissions without revealing any proprietary operating data to the company. For example, if an environmentalist group has questions about a company's reported emissions, it could develop its own smart contract for auditing emissions. It could then ask that they be deployed, possibly by a neutral third party service provider, to the company's private channel. The smart contract could audit the data and report its results without sharing the company's data with the environmentalist group.
Why Open Source
There Today, there are a lot of different environmental certifications today, and the general public often doesn't know which one they could trust. Some Thus, some consumers feel that any business which makes a pro-environment claim is "greenwashing," while many businesses feel that no matter what they do, it's not good enough for the radicals out there.
Part of the problem is that the different This is a problem of transparency, not of data but of methodologies. Today's certifications are either opaque, proprietary, or at least highly complex. By putting the certifications down in The solution is to turn certifications into software code and making make them open source, we can address this problem. Anybody can so anybody could study a certification and objectively analyze its meritsunderstand what it does. Furthermore, if the code for the certifications are open source, then anybody could take extend an existing certification and make their own version. So if you feel that a business is using a certification that process is too lax, you can make modify it and create your own certification, write it as smart code, and share it with the world. If enough people believe that your certification process is better, then you could get companies to adopt it.
By creating an open source system to audit emissions, we would not only create a system that would help reduce the cost of carbon neutral certifications, but also make it possible for the certifications and standards to become open and transparent, so that investors, consumers, and the general public could finally trust in the climate actions that businesse are taking.
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While carbon audits and certifications are complex, a lot of data could be obtained automatically now. For example, utility bills, corporate travel, server usage, and shipping data could all be obtained by API calls. This means that if you work for a professional services such as software or IT consulting, an automated system using the blockchain could audit your company's emissions and certify your company as carbon neutral.
As open source developers, this could be the most direct way we could do something about climate change.