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 economic output instead of carbon emissions data for any particular product.
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Meetings
We will be part of the Hyperledger Climate Action and Accounting SIG Meetings – See you there!
Scope
The current scope of this working group includes:
- 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 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.
Ongoing Work
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- 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.
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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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Why Hyperledger
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Because it's a permissioned ledger, Hyperledger also does not need the proof-of-work algorithms used by public ledgers such as Bitcoins. This makes it both much faster and more energy efficient. Since our goal is to stop climate change, we would naturally want an energy efficient technology to do it with.
How to Get Started
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