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From YouTube: Building the Climate Data Internet - Marco Schletz - Selva (Track 2)

Description

The Paris Agreement marked a fundamental change from previously centralized systems to bottom-up and decentralized approaches. At the same time, our society is transitioning from analog to digital solutions to improve global coordination. This workshop will discuss the possible implications of these transitions and the potential role of emerging technologies. More specifically, we’ll discuss how emerging technologies, such as the internet of things, artificial intelligence, and blockchain, can improve digital monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) procedures to improve data transparency and eliminate information asymmetry in climate market accounting.

For this, in my talk, I will explore the following dimensions:
1. Outline a global “climate data internet”;
2. Discuss the present landscape of climate accounting systems and the current process of climate asset development;
3. Speak about the role of emerging technologies and new paradigms such as regenerative finance (ReFi).

- Sustainable Blockchain Summit LATAM 2022 - https://sbs.tech/

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And I'm going to talk about the climate data Internet and I'm, going to do something which everyone would tell you that a speaker shouldn't be doing so. I'll antagonize the room a little bit today saying that everyone here in the refi space is speaking about fragmentation and the need for interoperability.

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But I haven't seen anyone or heard anyone speak about the role of governments and, like the broader climate terrorist agreement, ecosystem that we should be very mindful of, and to be frank, if the Paris agreement and National actors are not participating in this refi won't matter because you cannot enforce it.

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So this is the role and the value that we seek to provide by building the climate data Internet and we, as the data driven envirolab and the open Earth Foundation I, have already heard today that climate change was framed as the biggest coordination challenge that Humanity has ever faced and I think it's needless to say to everyone in this room that we are failing miserably at the moment.

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So that's why we need the climate data Internet and we came up with this fancy diagram and don't worry. I won't talk you through all the details of it, but I will focus on the five core components of it. The first one is Earth, System state being located down there, and that is a system that generates and tells us. This is where we're at in terms of global warming. Right now, if you're, looking at National Data and the Paris agreement, the data that we have available is like five years old.

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In the best case, we have such an information delay of all of it. We don't know where we are at right now. We can measure a bit of what is in the atmosphere right now, but even that is the guesstimate, but we have now a way of saying. Oh, this government is on track right now, because the next reporting will be far in the future and the people that have made the commitments will be out of office in most cases.

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So that's why we need a place where we can go and say: yes, we are on track. This is what the government promised you, or this is what the city or the corporation promised you and they are doing their job or they are not doing their job to hold them accountable.

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The next part is a big system of what system registries, and this is where the voluntary carbon markets are coming into place, but also National Registries, so, basically, all the different data systems that are fragmented currently all over the world and again these are National sub-national Regional um City level corporations. We have a lot of different actors in this space, not only the corporate sector.

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The next part is about climate action, certification and luckily I've heard a lot about it. The need for digital mrv thinking about how we can scale the monitoring, reporting and verification with emerging Technologies and how we can get to a state where we can certify that, actually that an action has been happening right now and then we can use this to create assets and really monetary incentives to create action which is currently not the case. I mean I.

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Think Vera was something from like half a year delay for just issuing the PDF report, so something where we have a something that's close to the real-time state of the system.

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The next part of this climate data Internet is a climate market and again I saw something today, where a map of all the different carbon pricing mechanisms that are out there right now, I think last time, I counted.

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It was like 60 different carbon pricing mechanisms all over the world, ranging with prices from something like one dollar to 100 or 130 in the case of Sweden, which I think is still the best country in terms of pricing, but it just shows how much discrepancy and information asymmetry is between different systems and there's also a reason why this dip, why these different carbon pricing mechanisms have different values, simply because they are using different types of methodologies that might be more or less reliable, but the needs for a global carbon Market where we can really assign or where the market can assign.

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It's, not a political instrument.

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It needs to be assigned by the market can assign a fair value, requires a common pool of all carbon pricing and, like just one market like like, like a market, should work and the last one is on climate Finance, which specifically matters in the in the setting of developing countries, because countries will get some financial support from developed countries based on their reporting and what they can be doing at the moment, there are huge discounts if we speak about climate markets, um so the the asset value that carbon action can have, or also climate finance, and that links to the quality of accounting that a country can provide, and a lot of developing countries have very limited capacities to do carbon accounting.

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So by enabling countries to access Accounting in a cheaper and more scalable way. We are Paving the way to make them to to enable Financial inclusion and create more regenerative systems in these countries. So this is what the open climate framework is about. This is what we are building towards when we're speaking about the climate data Internet, and we are doing so recognizing that this is not something that one institution or even a handful or hundreds of Institutions can be doing.

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It's really a global effort and we need to create a lot of communities that are working together. It's a bottom-up effort, but also recognizing the role of the top-down and informing kind of like National level actors, so I'll go through all of them in more detail. So I will just outline the four different components that we're working on the second one is the global stock take um which is the official mechanism of the Paris agreement.

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It's basically a global accounting exercise where all countries are submitting a PDF report or an Excel sheet on a five-year basis. Then it will take two to three years to to assess how much the countries were of their targets and then we're saying, oh, who could have known.

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um We have an alternative design for that and the the third one is on infrastructure. So really thinking about how we create interoperability across all these different, fragmented actors and the different fragmented data systems that are out there out there and the third and the fourth one is on Automation and Earth oracles, which speed really speaks to the need of having a global state of climate change. So being able to say this is where we are at right now today.

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So the first part that I meant um or that I said- is the community part um and here for us, it's really about open collaboration and include building an inclusive system. Right now we are working with over 60 different climate data expert organizations on understanding what they have been doing, the last 10 15 years, because we don't necessarily need to start from scratch.

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But we also need to understand what has been done in this space to kind of get an idea of the ecosystem and identify gaps and where we can be most effective in leveraging new points or yeah, where this current system is falling short and here we're working across three different work streams. The first one is being on data harmonization. So everything that comes from data taxonomy data, schemas data, uh yeah harmonization, so that data between different Data Systems becomes comparable, because at the moment formats are wildly different.

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I think everyone in the voluntary carbon space can approve that. But then we also have data from cities from National actors, and everyone is doing using their own formats, it's terrible, but so a lot of work needed there.

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Second word extreme is on digital infrastructure, which is basically about creating automatic flows of data between systems, because I said like with the global stock take mechanism, everyone is transferring data manually, which causes huge information delay and which makes it also very expensive to do so so thinking about how can we create a digitally integrated system where, where data is Flowing automatically, we just needed to get to like a real-time status that that we we need to get to and the third one is thinking about. How can we make this use case relevant?

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But how can we also inform current policy decisions at the top levels that are happening so we're speaking to un bodies um to the World Bank about kind of like? How can we, how can we get them to innovate because these organizations are terrible at innovating, but they are still very important leverage points in this entire system and by making them understand that this matters and providing them with resources, we can shape what is going on.

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We, we can do our silent efforts, but it's also really important that at some point we share what we are learning here to really leverage these points in the broader climate community.

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So when I was speaking about the community, um we have monthly meetings. It's an open Community. Everyone can join on my last slide. I have a link to it, so please feel free to join. We are currently hosting a climate data Thon, which is the first stock taking exercise at a global scale. We have almost 100 teams that are contributing open data sets and then Analyze That to kind of like do a stock taking exercise right now, which is going what what countries need to be doing last year and sorry next year um and yeah.

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So so, unfortunately, this data is closing on the October 15th, so this Friday, so you won't be able to contribute, but um it just shows kind of like how we work, and then we have another initiative coming up again. I'll refer to that on the last slide, and then this diagram here in very small letters, just shows that we want to work towards a common Vision.

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This was a session where all these different organizations work together on identifying the three work streams and then also the critical Milestones that we need to get to assistant by 2030 that enables climate governance in the way that we need it to achieve the goals of the Paris agreement.

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The next Point um of our activities refers to digitally, enabled independent Global stock takes, and here two parts are essential. The one is digitally enabled so really bringing the climate space from the manual Legacy system into the the digital realm. So making data machine readable, like things that are totally taken for granted in every other discipline, are very new and Innovative things in the climate space. So how can we prepare the climate space for being becoming Innovative? How can we share what we are doing with the broader climate community?

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The second part is that we are focusing on the independent part of the global stock. Take generally, the global stock take focuses only on this side, which is the official country level stock, take of the UNF Triple C, the United, Nations, Secretariat um and kind of like this has has a superficial assessment. What we are focusing in is how do we engage with non-state climate actors like cities and corporations, but also then the climate data ecosystem, the voluntary climate data system? I?

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Don't need to talk about it too much here, because that's where, basically, everyone is located, but the need is to aggregate this data to make it available for the GST, so that at some point the independent data, which is actually a lot better than the official data, can be integrated into the global state of action.

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What we're working towards with is Dick's initiative, the digitally enabled independent Global stock take is the idea of creating like a integrated interface, a dashboard where everyone can go to figure out. Oh, is my country on track? Is my region on track? It's my city on track is a certain corporation on track with what they need to do and kind of like having it in a nested way that we can scroll down from a global State.

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This is the the human standard to specific country contributions to regions in the country, to cities in the country, to corporations in the country and really just unravel it and be able to trace emission reductions from local to Global, and vice versa.

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The third point that we're working on is Building, open, Digital infrastructure, and here blockchain, is a very essential piece for it.

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One thing that we is essential to our work is that what we are creating is open and decentralized, so it shouldn't be a system that is owned by a specific Organization, no matter who it is, if it's a Microsoft, if it's a carbon call, if it's, whoever there's no one who should be owning the system, but it is a digital comment that should be accessible for everyone, so that we can build incentives on top, and that is essential for refi as well. If we have a centralized corporate owned infrastructure, we have failed.

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So we really need to create a digital comments in all of this. So blockchain is a key part where we create a shared Ledger of everyone of everyone. Everything that can be accessed by everyone and everyone will also can and wants to contribute to.

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The second part is that we can create digital trust and we have a really cool exercise at Devcon yesterday about just defining what is trust, and how do you build trust? um I? Will spare you like the 15 minutes of brainstorming on it, but I think we can just recognize that in our climate system? Right now, we have lost a lot of trust, because governments and decision makers have been failing all over again, but that is also a result of lacking incentives and accountability.

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So we hope, by increasing transparency and collaboration, to increase that level of trust again, so that people are willing to collaborate.

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The third one is nested spatial protocols which I talked about to be able to trace local to global data and vice versa, to really see how each actor at each government level is contributing and also in terms of achieving their own goals um and the fourth one is a really important point for kind of like corporate actors, where a lot of sensitive data is housed. So we need to enable solutions that are privacy, preserving while also guaranteeing transparency.

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So we need to enable kind of like an aggregation of data while still being able to trust that certain data points are correct um and something like verifiable credentials. Decentralized, identifiers, zero, Norris proofs. All of these Technologies play key roles in this, and this is my final slide. So I would really like to collaborate I'm here to meet all of you. It's my first event in the refi space, normally I'm. Thank you.

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Yeah normally, I'm I'm in the Legacy climate space I'm at the high climate politics levels at the cops and everything and I mean just being here- is such a nice feel that there's a lot of passion and Innovation happening not really a lot of egos, not everyone driving their own case. So it's really I'm really hopeful in this space and that's where I want to invest all my energies going forward, because I think this is where the change is happening.

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The only message is that I want to have is that we are still having to let the old people know how it's done um so. I mentioned briefly the climate action data 2.2 2.0 Community, we are open. We have a Wiki page where you can find a lot of information, please feel free to join. We have monthly meetings.

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um The next one was the climate data Zone, which is closing, unfortunately on Friday, but it is a really interesting exercise and you can find a lot of resources and materials on the website. So if you want to learn more about how we approach this and how general climate data ecosystem is happening, use this um last point, collabathon will be happening in April 2023 and we really want to Pivot towards the web 3 community and developing refi Solutions, based on the climate data.