Mission

In recent years, businesses and investors have become increasingly aware of climate change and are now taking positive action to stop it.  A In response to increasing awareness about climate change, more and more companies are now pledging to become carbon neutral.  A great example is Microsoft's initiative to become carbon neutral and eventually carbon negative.  For these initiatives to succeed, multiple parties including institutional investors, major corporations, supply chain partners, environmentalist groups, government regulators, and the general public must now work together, sometimes for the first time.  This new collaboration in turn requires exchanging data and building trust across traditional boundaries.  

Blockchain or distributed ledger technologies (DLT's) should be the backbone of any multi-party collaboration on climate change, because they are designed to address exactly these issues. 

The mission of this working group is to identify how DLT's could improve corporate carbon accounting and thus make carbon neutral certifications process both easier and more open, transparent, and credible.  We're here to help 

• Businesses and organizations take action on climate change by making the process simpler and less costly.
• Certifying entities streamline the process for high quality analysis and verification.  
• General public and consumers by providing open and transparent view of corporate climate action.
• Investment community with high quality tools to verify corporate sustainability claims.

We will work closely with the Standards - WG as part of understanding the standards and implementing the technologies for climate accounting. 

Scope

The current scope of this working group includes:

• Identifying standards for corporate climate accounting and certifications
• Provide recommendations on how DLT's could complement or improve current industry processes 
• Implementing open source DLT software for climate accounting and certifications
• Promoting awareness and positive action in the larger Hyperledger and DLT community
• Educating other stakeholders on the value of DLT's and Hyperledger in climate change.

These initiatives often involve several steps, including:

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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. 

The Data Challenge

A company looking to become Carbon Neutral must first perform an audit to determine its emissions.  The Greenhouse Gas Protocol specifies Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions from direct energy use (fuel burned on site), indirect energy use (energy purchased from utilities), and all other significant activities of the business, including raw materials purchased, transportation of goods, travel and commuting of employees, and leased assets such as office space.  

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In reality, much of this data may either be difficult to get or simply not available.  Sometimes data is simply not available, and generic model values from either free LCA repositories or proprietary ones have to be used.  At other times, the high cost or complexity of obtaining the data would require a judgement call about whether the activity is "significant" to the company's overall emissions or not.  

The Questions of Trust

Can we trust the data that the company has provided? 

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On the flipside, how much data can the company share before it's giving away proprietary competitive information?

Trust in the Blockchain

A permissioned blockchain such as Hyperledger Fabric could be used to address issues like this:

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Hyperledger Fabric channels and chain code allow additional parties to audit a company's emissions without revealing any proprietary 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

Today, there are a lot of different environmental certifications, and the general public often doesn't know which one they could trust.  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.

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By creating an open source system to audit emissions, we would not only 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.

How to Get Started

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.

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