...
If you're interested, please check the calendar for the next call.
...
Mission
In recent years, businesses and investors have become increasingly aware of climate change and are now taking positive action to stop it. 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.
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 of a supply chain 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. Those emissions calculations should be made by trusted auditors, or software developed by such trusted parties. 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.
Blockchain The mission of this working group is to identify how 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. The mission of this working group is to identify how DLT's could improve corporate or personal carbon accounting and make carbon accounting and certifications more open, transparent, and credible. We're here to help
- Businesses and organizations take action on climate change by making the process easier and less costly.
- Certifying entities do more scale by streamlining the process for verifying verification of corporate climate action.
- General public and consumers trust corporate climate action with open and transparent analysis.Investment community gain deeper understanding of corporate sustianability claims through more data and analysis tools.
- Lenders and investors align their capital decisions with climate goals.
- Offset buyers and developeres connect with each other with greater trust and transparency.
We will work closely with the Standards - WG as part of understanding the standards and implementing the technologies for climate accounting and the Consumer Disclosure Working Group to implement applications that consumers could use to understand their own CO2 emissions footprint.
...
We have a bi-weekly Peer Programming Zoom call for developers on Mondays at 9 AM US Pacific time (UTC-07:00 America/Los Angeles.)
We're currently implementing the Utility Emissions Channel use case together.
If you're interested, please check the calendar for the next call.
...
- 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 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.
Background
...
As the world gets serious about climate change, the discussion is increasingly shifting from "Should" to "How":
- How do consumers know that a "green product" is really better for the climate?
- How do investors know that portfoio companies are achieving their climate goals?
- How do offset buyers know that the offsets work?
- How do lenders know that green bonds and transition bonds are driving positive climate action?
The only way we could do this is with a climate accounting system, similar to the financial accounting system that drives all economies. Yet today, such an accounting system does not really exist
- Auditing their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
- Establishing a plan for reducing the company's own emissions over time.
- Purchasing carbon offsets to offset current emissions to achieve carbon neutrality.
- Obtaining a carbon neutrality certification from a certifying entity.
Yet these steps are often difficult for the companies themselves and at times met with skepticism from the general public. This is because of the challenges of data and trust.
...
The high cost or complexity of obtaining the data 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 What incentive does that a particular manufacturer have to reduce its emissions?
...
- Automate data collection from a large number of sources, as is typical in supply chains.
- Maintain audit trail of immutable records, so that emissions calculations could be verified later without relying on one central repository.
- Create trust in CO2 emissions accounts as they are transacted across industrial and national boundaries, where no trusted central repository exists.
- Allow consumers to participate in climate action plans of the companies they buy from and invest in.
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.
...