Help Hyperledger Cactus Advance Climate Action

“Climate change represents an existential threat to humanity and will require the greatest mobilization of resources and collaboration in human history.” – Hyperledger Climate Action and Accounting Special Interest Group

In response to a recent call to action in a previous blog post “Help Us Scale Up Our Operating System for Climate Action,” the Hyperledger Cactus maintainers have decided to do our part by exploring new ways to use blockchain technology to help address challenges with climate change.

The Hyperledger Climate Action and Accounting Special Interest Group (CA2 SIG) has developed a carbon accounting tool that supports multiple smart contracts that operate across different ledgers such as the Ethereum main net and a Hyperledger Fabric network. 

Given that Hyperledger Cactus is a framework to make it easier to create and maintain software that operates across different distributed ledgers, maintainer Peter Somogyvari decided to evaluate what we could do to help. Peter discovered the potential for Cactus to make it easier for the CA2 SIG to perform their important work on the carbon accounting tool. We then put into motion the following three-step action plan:

1. Create a full-fledged, end-to-end example application for our documentation that will mirror the existing carbon accounting tool, but built on top of Hyperledger Cactus.
   1. This will familiarize us with the carbon accounting tool on a code level and highlight potential feature gaps of Hyperledger Cactus itself.
2. Organize discovery sessions with the maintainers of the carbon accounting tool at the CA2 SIG to see where and how we can add value by potentially migrating some or all parts of the carbon accounting tool to use Hyperledger Cactus.
3. Produce a list of first issues that are specific to climate action and carbon accounting for the Hyperledger Cactus issue tracker.

How Can You Help?

As an open source community, Hyperledger relies on the active involvement of people like you. All are welcome and invited to help us use blockchain technology to address climate challenges by applying Cactus to the carbon accounting tool. To get started, take the following steps:

1. Join our daily interactive pair programming sessions, our mailing list, or chat channel, depending on your personal preferences.
2. Grab a good first issue in our issue tracker: GFI_Climate_Action_SIG.
3. Open a bug or feature request if you found a problem or something that is missing.

With your help, we hope to see these outcomes from our action plan:

1. Lead by example and by doing what we can.
2. Make the work on the carbon accounting tool easier/faster by leveraging Hyperledger Cactus.
3. Provide a way for people who wish to contribute to Hyperledger Cactus to help advance climate action by filtering our issue tracker’s contents through the GFI_Climate_Action_SIG label.

Our plan above should demonstrate that it is possible to apply blockchain technology for good.

Solving the existential crisis of climate change is not a zero sum game.