Hyperledger Foundation Climate Action & Accounting SIG, 28 Aug 2020

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From YouTube: Climate Accounting Standards and Protocols Work Group

Description

The Hyperledger Climate Action and Accounting Special Interest Group is an open forum where people who are interested in using blockchain in climate-related use cases can collaborate. This recording is from one of the leads of the Climate Accounting Standards and Protocols Work Group, who shares about the status of their project and explains how people can get involved if they are interested.

More about the Climate Action and Accounting Special Interest Group is at:

https://wiki.hyperledger.org/display/CASIG/

Please feel free to join the discussion and introduce yourself on the group's mailing list at:

https://lists.hyperledger.org/g/climate-sig

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Hi everyone, my name, is martin weinstein, I'm one of the chairs here at the hyperledger climate action special interest group and uh one of the things that has been happening since we launched at the beginning of the year is that we've been gathering different areas of the community to put working group efforts around to present very quickly today is on the standards and protocols working group uh there's been three working groups: one's on consumer disclosure, one on um carbon neutrality, certifications and standards, as I'll describe, I think, is one of the things that underlines the other work groups as well.

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Some of the key active members are christian powell from uh nova institute uh tom bauman. uh My other um co-chair, unfortunately, both have not been able to join so I'll, be I'll, be also representing um their coordination efforts on on their behalf, one of the things that's quite relevant when we think about climate accounting and the relevance of climate action accounting is that star.

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Centers is really what allows us to do um ensure that things are speaking the same language when someone measures an action on the ground when we are using iot devices um when we're when we're working on a company level or an individual level, whether it's a carbon footprint, whether it's certifying a renewable energy project, how that fits within a national level inventory a country effort.

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It's it's really the the common language that allows this accounting to integrate, integrate towards, ultimately, the ultimate accounting realm, which is planet earth. uh In the case of the climate challenge, everything needs to be able to some sense, aggregate and scale up and roll up to that global level and speak ideally directly to the paris agreement.

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So uh standards is really what allows us to ensure that all the different efforts and the business efforts, because since the last three or four years, there's been an amazing amount of companies producing different tokens for carbon certifications, tokens for carbon offsets, but but we're moving into a future of an interconnected climate market where we need to make sure that we can speak uh at least common languages. And this actually remember reminds us a lot of how the internet evolved and the role that protocols have to allow for that interoperability to happen.

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If you think about emails, we have the smart mail transfer protocol. If we think about websites, we have the hyperspace um the hypertext transaction protocol, and this is the type of things that we're also looking in the evolution of the the climate world, as we have to coordinate our efforts as a global community in sync.

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So I'll just that's in some sense the general context of why standards and protocols are so relevant for the climate space and I'll give a slight context of why they're specifically interesting for our special interest group. So uh we we have two other videos that were presented by our working group leaders, one on consumer disclosure and one on carbon neutrality and I'll share my screen just to to give you a sense of what's the framework for how standards fit also within those working groups.

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The generic role of any form of certificate of quality that can obviously be tokenized is the outcome of a process of reviewing right or review process, and what the standard allows is that we use the same type of logics on how we review a certain process and we use the same type of standards for a certificate of quality, for that it also links to the digital verification, the records that are assigned to those uh standards.

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um Now we can think generically of how this applies to our couple of working groups. So if we think about carbon neutrality, what its efforts are about are the carbon neutral calculations. For, let's say, data servers is a good example. Out of that comes a carbon neutral certificate. A claim that that speaks to whether uh uh basically data hosting is is, is carbon neutral? Not so we really need to have those standards, technology, accounting, offset standards and the digital verification of records that take the form of software.

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We could do the same thing from the point of view of consumer disclosure. What we're looking at in consumer disclosure, with what we've been focusing on is supply chain, tracking and accounting with a certificate of quality. That says this is the rating of the product. This is how much uh carbon was uh emitted by the production and the consumption of that product. So back again, this is where standards fit and the role that software can help in simplifying and easing the role of those standards applied to those different use cases. Now.

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This is also a fractal logic, because different parts of a review when we're reviewing a process hack, can have their own internal uh process review. Supply chains are extremely complex. Climate accounting is extremely interconnected.

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So if we're able to come up and explore the ways in which uh distributed larger technologies help create a chain of trust around the standards and the verification process, then we can able to produce tools that better cater to different use, cases that address facility, the certificates of quality and, obviously the tokenization field. So, for example, this. What I'm showing here is part of the google slide that we put together within the uh the special interest with wiki. So anyone that's interested on the standards uh working group.

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This is this is definitely the place to go and there's a lot of content that we've been able to put together and a lot of work around climate um mapping, some of these uh standards and certificates.

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So um a couple of last comments that I want to make is: what's what's really what distinguishes the approach that we've decided to to take, and obviously there's a there's, a couple of uh series of types of uh standards uh that we have to look at on one side. Technical standards uh like w3c, has a big part in terms of.

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You know the the type of protocols networking languages that are used, there's, obviously a lot of accounting standards. Greenhouse gas protocols are quite relevant, but also environmental performance standards and standards related to products. So one side, we have to look at the types of standards on the other side of the type of families that are specifically relevant to the climate world.

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So when it comes to climate, we in our discussion so far, the working group- we could really break it down to some for pieces of families. One is measuring collecting data that relates to activities climate action activities. uh What are the methodologies that are associated to to that? That's, probably the second uh family um and on one side, there's methodologies for acquiring data, and then there's methodologies and standards for processing that data in terms of transforming that raw data into values that we can actually assign to either a climate action or a product.

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The third family relates more to uh the the reporting standards it's like. Now we have the data we've processed, the data we're going to report around that which is very specific to the claims. um What are the standards that we use there and then the fourth one is the the quality standards, the verification of all those previous steps? So it's really quite a broad feel now. What is our role within that is not to develop standards?

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There's a lot of standards bodies, there's a lot of alliances that are have been forming around climate, the climate space that really we can leverage from. So really a role is to help by mapping the field. uh That's one of the things we noticed, that was a gap that we can come up with a working group to help fill the gap.

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Classify you know in in some ways evaluate different taxonomies that can be used for standards and explore how software can be leveraged to digitize processes in the standardization process and fundamentally collaborate with anyone else working on the standard space in the climate world, where our efforts can be compatible.

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What are the type of work uh and collaborations that we're looking at from the pla from the working group? Well, if you're a standards expert, irrespective of the climate space, then your input as a subject domain expert is very much welcome on how we tackle this. If you're a climate, mrv, expert monitoring, reporting verifying actions, then your role's also very critical, because a lot of the climate standards are historically analog, they haven't been digitized, and so the big role about standardization is how do we make this digitally compatible?

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Finally, if you uh are spearheading or part of an initiative, that's actively working on standards around climate tokens, um then then our work with you is specifically.

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