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Hyperledger Climate Action & Accounting Special Interest Group (CA2SIG) Q1 Q3/Q4 2021
This is the second half of the 2nd year of the CA2SIG. We are closing the year with ??? members in 282 (+70 in since Q2/2021) members on our mailing list!
The SIG ended the year with the year with 3 different 5 active working groups, each with its own team leader:
- Carbon Accounting and Certification WG (Status: active)
- Standards WG (Status: active)Consumer Disclosure
- Climate Research WG (Status: semi- active)
During the first half of the year the CA2SIG kicked off 2 additional working groups:
- Awareness and Capacity Building WG (Status: active)
- CSR Reporting WG Climate Research WG (Status: active)
One working group lost traction over the year and is currently not active::
- Consumer Disclosure Awareness and Capacity Building WG (Status: not active)
We have held 13 12 general meetings, 12 13 Peer Programming Calls, and 6 12 Standards WG meetings so far this in the second half of the year. As part of the normal cycle of co-chairs, the beginning of 2021 2022 marks the time to change the SIG chairs. Both Martin Wainstein and Tom Baumann, the 2020 founding chairs, stepped down in order to give space to new community members to help drive the SIG forward. Sherwood Moore and Robin Klemens volunteered to be the new are co-chairs of the CA2 SIG and the group welcomed them without any objectionschairing the group.
What's Working Well
- Bi-weekly calls have consistency, and we have a max group of around 10 12 recurring and 3-15 additional but frequently changing participants that give continuity to dialogues. The number of attendees has gone up a bit (3-5 attendees) since last yearQ2/2021. At least one chair is always present in meeting to give continuity as well.
- The group invited 6 expert guest speakers to their general meeting. These presentations attracted 20-60 participants each.
- New Member Introductions feature in every call is working well. We receive new members frequently. However, we don't necessarily get first timers to continue showing up.
- Working groups have significantly ramped up interesting conversations and get gotten diverse members engaged. Some are working towards MVP developments, which will lead to more interest.
- This year, members of the CA2SIG participated in a collaborative planning exercise to establish the CA2SIG 2021 Goals and Action Plan. The SIG identified several key objectives for the year, these include:
- Develop more use cases
- Develop more proofs of concept
- Facilitate the development of Standards
- Grow membership and build capacity of the CA2SIG
- Build awareness about climate accounting and establish CA2SIG thought leadership around it
- Build Coalitions
- Ecosystem / Value-chain mapping
- Explore how to develop a data commons
- Carbon Accounting and Certification Working Group successfully launched their Hyperledger Fabric network. The network is part of the first layer of the Operating System for Climate Action which is the foundation of trust of all climate action. The network consists of one channel (utilityemissionschannel) and the utilityemissions chaincode is deployed. In the next step, Si Chen and his team will connect the openseas app to the network. Then we will all be able to calculate the carbon emissions of our utility bills and store the data immutably on the blockchain.
- The group has come up with 4 mentorship projects as part of the Hyperledger Mentorship Program that started in June
- The group has come up with 3 blog posts
Issues being faced by the group
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- The group mentored in four mentorship projects as part of the Hyperledger Mentorship Program that started in June. A special thanks goes out to all the mentees and mentors. At this point, we want to highlight the efforts of Si Chen who mentored all 4 mentees and was the main driver behind the mentorship program.
- Blockchain Integration for Climate Emissions Data with Fabric and Cactus - We thank our mentee Pritam Singh. Also we want to thank Peter Somogyvari who mentored from the Hyperledger Cactus side
- Documentation and Use Cases for Climate Action - We thank our mentee Dounia Marbouh
- Implement Client Side Security for Climate SIG Fabric Application - We thank our mentee Bertrand WILLIAMSRIOUX
- Automated Testing for Climate Emissions Ledger - We thank our mentee Harsh Sharma
- Carbon Accounting and Certification Working Group completed a research paper Voluntary Carbon Offsets: An Empirical Market Study, improved the connection between Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum, and implemented client side security for Fabric using web-socket and Vault Transit engine. We are currently working on extending the carbon calculator to cover the full scope emission (scope 1,2 and 3) and uses data from several open databases across the globe.
- The Supply Chain Emissions Project (nested under the Carbon Accounting and Certification Working Group) was created in late 2021 and has made early progress exploring the possibility of a cross-sig project with the Supply Chain / Trade Finance SIG.
- The Standards WG analyzed existing carbon emission calculation tools and discussed differences between climate account vs other forms of accounting. They are currently developing an ontology for climate accounting.
- The Research WG published a paper on the Voluntary Carbon Offsets Market (published as Voluntary Carbon Offsets: An Empirical Market Study on SSRN).
- The CSR Reporting WG is currently doing market research to identify the problem of Corporate Social Responsibility reporting. Results will be published in Q1 of 2022. Thanks to Ermanno Camerinellifor leading the research.
- The group presented Global Climate Accounting two times this year and received great interest from the audience.
- The first presentation was hosted by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), as part of a Digital Discovery Session titled: Open Digital Infrastructure for Global Climate Innovation and Accounting. Please click the link provided for access to a recording of the presentation.
- The second presentation was held by Robin Klemens at Blockchain Europe 2021 in Hamburg. The slides are at Resources and the recording will be shared with the group once published.
- The group also contributed to the UNEP sponsored Coalition for Digital Environmental Sustainability (CODES) Action Plan. The CA2SIG contributed language to the action plan which is highlighting the need of global multistakeholder participation in an Open Global Climate Accounting System. The CODES action plan is scheduled to be published in early 2022.
Issues being faced by the group
- Working groups still have low engagement and support outside meetings, and will need more commitment to arrive towards milestones and products.
- Meetings still oscillate in 812-15 20 in attendance and don't go up very much, or at least we don't get many new members that are consistently joining. More communication and outreach is needed, which falls back to issue in bullet 1.
- The group faced several disruptions in the mailing lists, the rocket chat, and the wiki that lead to confusion and off-topic discussion during the first quarter of the year
- The group identifies that solid proof use cases are essential to convincing people from the open-source community to get engaged and also to collaborate with other institutions and cooperations. The SIG is currently looking for guidance on how to create use cases.
- The SIG would benefit from increased enterprise / corporate sponsorship and participation. In 2022, we plan to explore using business cases to actively recruit corporate sponsorship and participation.
List of planned next stepsList of planned work products
- Carbon neutrality certificate concept and MVP
- Climate standards mapping exercise
- Consumer disclosure MVP, connecting supply chains with carbon data for accounting
- Active node in a climate accounting collaborative hackathon this November.
- Publish a technical paper about Voluntary Carbon Offsets Directory
- The Supply Chain Emissions Project is developing a business case that it will use to actively recruit new participation and support from enterprise enterprise partners seeking to build solutions to solve the challenge of Scope 3 supply chain carbon emissions reporting using Hyperledger.
- The group will publish a blog post featuring all guest presentations throughout the year 2021.
- The group started piloting with POAPs and iterate closely together with the community architects of Hyperledger. The first meeting badge has already been created and is at https://app.poap.xyz/token/3496829Kick-off a project for Blockchain-enabled CSR reporting