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Today, this is simply not possible.  Some data, such as utility bills or shipping records, are held in those institutions' data siloes and are tedious to get.  Most data, though, is just not available.  Most products involve multiple materials and activities to manufacture and  distribute, and the data for the carbon footprint of their raw materials and activities are not available.  As a result, we have to rely on broad aggregates of national economic output instead of carbon emissions data for any particular organization or individual.

While it may never be possible to account for the exact carbon emissions of a single unit of product, just like it's not possible to account for the exact value or cost of single unit of production in traditional accounting, we need to improve the quality of carbon accounting so that it could be reasonably done at an organizational or a personal level.  Only by doing so could we attribute climate impact and encourage climate action properly.    

To do, every member The solution is for members of a supply chain make the would need to be able to get the data they need to make reasonable carbon emissions calculations of their products and services, and then be able to publish those emissions for the products and services they make.  Then customers or users in the next step of the supply chain could use those emissions data to calculate their own emissions.  This would require transmitting data across a large number of organizations and activities across multiple industries and supply chains.  The challenge is one of scope and scale.

available, so that it becomes easy to calculate the carbon emissions of products and services made from them.  Blockchain or distributed ledger technologies (DLT's) are specifically designed for such scenarios and could be the backbone of any multi-party collaboration on climate change.  They allow values, in this case of carbon emissions, to be tokenized and transferred through a supply chain of multiple, disparate parties across traditional national and industry boundaries.  These tokens of carbon emissions could be attached to invoices and give us hard data based on real transactions for emissions calculations. 

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• Identifying standards for corporate climate accounting and certifications.
• Providing recommendations on how DLT's could complement or improve current industry processes .
• Implementing open source DLT software for climate to demonstrate 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.

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Background

Many companies today are starting to account for and limit their climate impact, going as far as trying to achieve carbon or climate neutrality. These corporate initiatives often involve several steps, including:

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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, or whether generic or model data would be sufficient.  has limited both the quantity and quality of data used for emissions calculations.  Often, emissions are calculated based on national and industry level economic activity–for example, the plastics industry in the United States as a whole.  If that's case, how do we know what the emissions of a particular plastic packaging manufacturer are?  And what incentive does that particular manufacturer have to reduce its emissions?

The Questions of Trust

Knowing thisAt the same time, it's not hard to see why the general public could be skeptical of a company's climate action claims.  After all, as consumers,

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Meanwhile, institutional investors such as the Net Zero Asset Owner Alliance or Climate Action 100+ have a different trust issue.  They are used to more in-depth analysis and independent verification of companies' claims, and carbon neutral certifications do not have the same level of detail as other financial ratings they are accustomed to.  For example, when investing in bonds, it's not enough that one rating agency, such as Standard & Poors or Moody's, considers a bond "investment grade."  They typically require credit ratings by more than one rating agency, and the ratings are in tiers from AAA (highest credit quality) to CCC (high default risk.)   As climate neutrality becomes important to them, they would probably demand the same level of detail in ratings of corporate climate action.

Why Blockchain (DLT's)

Fortunately, blockchains or distributed ledger technologies (DLT's) are by design suited made for solving precisely these issues.  They are an "internet of value" where data could be transacted across different organizations through a shared ledger.  Furthermore, they are "trustless" networks and do not require trust in a single organization, whether it's the company making a climate action claim or an entity certifying it.  Instead, the architecture of DLT's allows they allow multiple parties to come together and verify all claims independently with data and code.

In this case, a permissioned blockchain such as Hyperledger Fabric allows a company to share its data for independent verification by trusted parties.  Thus, it could provide transparency and protect privacy at the same time.  For example,

• A private channel could be set up for a company, its trusted data sources, and certifying entities. 
• The data sources could include tokens of carbon emissions from utilities, suppliers, shippers, and other sources.   By turning emissions data into tokens, they become standardized accounts of emissions that could be transferred across different organizations.  
• 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 blockchain, for example as a token.

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

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.  With blockchains,

• A company could share its operating data with multiple auditing entities to calculate its emissions on a secured, private channel. 
• It could then share its emissions data with its customers on a private channel.
• If multiple companies are sharing their data on one or more blockchains or channels, the next company could subscribe to those channels to obtain the data for emissions calculations automatically.

Why Open Source

By making the source code available, we make the carbon emissions accounting and certification process transparent, so that all stakeholders could see what went into it.  This increases the trust in the results.

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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. We're working on a See the Carbon Accounting and Certification Minimum Viable Product (MVP) which will provide a demonstration of how to do this with Hyperledger to learn more about how we're building software for climate accounting.