An SLA defines the services delivered by a provider to a client and the metrics for measuring those services. If the actual services received by the client do not meet the SLA guarantees promised by the provider, the agreement has been violated. In that case, the provider may owe the client a refund or whatever penalty is defined in the SLA.
The solution brief includes a high-level overview of a proposed solution for self-assessing SLAs. This proposed solution uses Hyperledger Fabric blockchain technology to tackle the gray areas of conventional SLA assessment.
This unique architecture provides a trusted and privacy-preserving network that can precisely monitor and compute SLA metrics, with full transparency for both provider and client.
Achieving effective SLA self-assessments will benefit everyone in the ecosystem by building trust, removing friction, streamlining processes, and saving costs.
The Problem: Lack of transparency
An effective SLA clearly defines all performance metrics and parameters.
But in most conventional SLAs, the provider assesses their own performance using their own tools and frameworks. The client generally has no way to see how these metrics are monitored or calculated. This increases the risk of biased results that favor the provider.
This lack of transparency means the client could well suffer from misunderstandings, missed violations, and insufficient refunds. All this undermines trust between the provider and the client.
The Solution: Using blockchain for transparent self-assessment
This solution brief proposes a novel architecture that is based on the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain framework and Hyperledger Fabric Private Chaincode (FPC). As shown in the figure below, the installed Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) provides secure and private monitoring, and computation of all performance metrics governed by the SLA.
Both client and provider benefit from the presented solution, which builds trust where little previously existed. More details are provided in the full white paper.
The scientific research performed on SLA Self-Assessment and applied to the telecom context adheres to work accomplished under the Pledger project.
The Hyperledger Telecom Special Interest Group would like to thank the following people who contributed to this solution brief: Nima Afraz, David Boswell, Gordon Graham, Nikolaos Kapsoulis, Antonios Litke, Alexandros Psychas, Vipin Rathi, and Theodora Varvarigou.
The Hyperledger Challenge 2022 took into careful consideration the following factors:
1. Technology advancement and research objectives 2. Impact to the blockchain ecosystem 3. Value addition through social benefits 4. Process followed to build an open-source community around the proposed project 5. Activities outside the Hyperledger community to build the ecosystem 6. Bring in innovation in the marketplace 7. Headway into the community that is not represented well within the ecosystem.
This Hyperledger Challenge 2022 award follows the recent announcement of another award from IBM’s 2022 Call for Code Green Practices Accelerator, where the CA2SIG team also took first place for its prototype.
“The team would like to thank the Hyperledger Challenge 2022 team for supporting our project. These recent wins/awards provide our team with added momentum and validation for the solution we are developing and the larger problem we seek to solve. Moving forward our focus is on marketing our solution to the energy industry and helping to scale auditing services, crucial to achieving climate targets by mid century. ” – Bertrand Rioux, Director, Two Ravens Energy & Climate Consulting
This prototype, which is built using Hyperledger Besu, Hyperledger Fabric, Hyperledger Bevel and Hyperledger Cactus, represents an important step towards creating an open climate accounting system that can be used to decarbonize corporate supply chains. By building a solution that can provide a free flow of trusted environmental data, we can create a more efficient marketplace that can unlock the power of green finance, consumer demand and government regulation to work together to decarbonize corporate supply chains. `
Click the CA2SIG One-Pager to learn more. We also invite you to visit the Climate Action and Accounting Wiki or join one of our bi-monthly meetings to learn about the different opportunities to get involved!
IBM just announced the winning prototype to Reduce Methane Emissions with Supply Chain Tokens built by members of Hyperledger’s Climate Action and Accounting Special Interest Group (CA2SIG) has been awarded first place in the 2022 IBM Call for Code Green Practices Accelerator. Each year, the IBM Call for Code challenge seeks the most creative and innovative solutions to help address issues of sustainability.
See the 2022 IBM Call for Code Announcement here (Time Code: 3:52)
Reducing methane emissions by the oil and gas industry is a vital step to achieving global greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets in the short-term. More than 5% of global emissions are caused by leaked, vented and flared methane gas during oil and gas production. This is a valuable natural resource with a market value exceeding $50 billion.
The team working on the winning prototype is developing an emission certification (token) platform for oil and gas production to support sustainable financing aligned with Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) investing. An ESG investor portal will help integrate verified methane emission metrics into performance-based financial instruments. Learn more about the Hyperledger Climate Action and Accounting SIG solution here.
The prototype uses Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to support the management of production and emissions data. This includes both private and public network components. The former includes Hyperledger Fabric emission and product data channels to support the verification of high volume data from oil and gas facilities. Using Hyperledger Cactus, these enterprise data networks are securely connected to Ethereum-based decentralized applications. This combination of DLT protects the privacy and commercial sensitivity of industry data, while providing verifiable metrics that can be tracked and traded as part within the measurement economy for GHG emissions.
What’s next?
In the near-term, our team will focus their efforts on organizing public geospatial data on oil and gas assets and production into a structured database. This is connected to our ESG investor portal to compare a registry of oil and gas assets, and their operators, against benchmarks for U.S. oil and gas production.
In the long-term, our team is designing an emission certification platform coordinated by a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) that will bring together verification professionals, standard setting bodies, data providers, and other industry stakeholders (e.g., regulators, voluntary carbon market providers).
Our vision is to provide the solutions needed to create an efficient marketplace for climate data that will incentivize corporations to decarbonize their supply chains by unlocking the combined incentives provided by green investment, government regulation, and consumer demand. To help accomplish this in the ongoing development of this prototype, the certificates issued to oil and gas producers are not only transferred to their downstream consumers such as energy and other commodity providers but extended into new certificates that can help provide a total value chain perspective on the waste emissions in the oil and gas supply chain.
Congratulations to CA2SIG community members Bertrand Roux, Si Chen, Arezki Djelouadji, and Sherwood Moore!
It has been over two years since we had a chance to get together in person and connect with Hyperledger community members from all over the world. Since Hyperledger Global Forum 2020, there have been hundreds of opportunities to meet online in calls and during virtual events, but those virtual interactions are just not the same as connecting with someone in real life.
The “hallway track” of a conference – the time in between sessions and other parts of the formal schedule where you walk around and meet new people and reconnect with friends and colleagues – is often people’s favorite part of an event. This informal opportunity to engage is what has been so hard to reproduce virtually (the Zoom breakout rooms, 2D and 3D online spaces and other attempts were worth trying but just aren’t as effective) so we are really looking forward to this part of Hyperledger Global Forum (HGF) this year.
To help people connect at HGF (#HyperledgerForum), we’re trying something that has been used in community events that Mozilla has run in the past. These community events were helpful in bringing people with similar interests together. For instance, you may be really interested in what is happening with blockchain in the telecom industry or you may want to speak in Spanish to someone about what is going on with deployments in Latin America, but you don’t know who to speak with as you’re walking around the event.
In order to help you find the right people to connect with, we’ll be setting up a Community Fair in the Expo Hall. The Fair will have a series of table tops manned by people from different parts of the community who are interested in meeting and talking with you. This will include people from our Special Interest Groups who are implementing Hyperledger projects in a range of different industries, people from our Regional Communities who are traveling in from all over the world, and people from our Working Groups who are exploring technical questions about distributed ledgers.
The goal of HGF is to create an event where community members from around the world can meet, align, plan and hack together in person. The sessions, workshops and other parts of the formal agenda will be very useful to help you do just that. We hope that the Community Fair will be another great addition to the formal part of the agenda.
Groups planning to participate in the Community Fair:
Regional Chapters
Brazil Chapter
India Chapter
Latinoamerica Chapter
Japan Chapter
Special Interest Groups
Climate Action and Accounting SIG
Telecom SIG
Financial Markets SIG
Media and Entertainment SIG
Working Groups
Learning Materials Development WG
Performance and Scale WG
Identity WG
Community Events
Hyperledger Challenge winner
Registration details for HGF are here. We hope you’ll join us and make the most of the Community Fair. Its goal is to make it easier for our community members to make valuable connections and find people and resources that align with their interests and needs, regardless of where they are in their enterprise blockchain journey.
It started out as two separate projects at the Climate Accounting and Action SIG, a Hyperledger group focused on using blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLT’s) to solve climate problems.
Bertrand Rioux, then a Research Fellow at the King Abdullah Petroleum Studies and Research Center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, started a project to use Hyperledger and DLT’s to reduce methane emissions in oil and gas production.
Meanwhile, halfway around the world in Los Angeles, Si Chen, who had developed open source ERP and CRM software and runs an ecommerce company, started a project to reduce emissions in transportation and the supply chain with DLT’s.
Then the world changed.
War, trade embargoes, and soaring energy prices have sent countries around the world scrambling to secure their energy sources.
Would this derail our last chance to reduce emissions and stop climate change?
Amazingly, the answer is no in at least one important way: Reducing methane emissions from oil and gas production could both help improve energy security and help the climate at the same time.
Here’s why: Each day at an oil or natural gas field, excess methane either leaks from the ground or is burnt (or “flared.”) This methane could also be sold as natural gas and used later if it could be captured and transported. The amount is mind boggling. According to FlareIntel, 260 billion cubic meters of methane is lost each year. This is 1.7 times the amount of natural gas Europe imports from Russia. It also has the climate impact of 1.3 billion cars — almost all the cars in the world, or nearly seven times the emissions of all the world’s airlines.
Capturing and using this methane as natural gas would both increase the amount of energy available and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Yet while the energy industry is behind it with many new initiatives, a lack of data on methane emissions and lack of focus to reduce them has held back progress. To encourage greater momentum, several groups have started to produce certifications for responsibly sourced natural gas, but these certifications are often proprietary and opaque to the general public.
The Climate SIG rallied together to address this critical problem with a bold plan: An open certification of natural gas that could be transferred through the supply chain, running on open source software and through distributed ledgers, so that it could be transparent to regulators, investors, and the general public. The solution involves four steps that combine the work of Methane Reduction and Supply Chain Decarbonization SIG projects:
1. Combine data from multiple sources, including company reports, government data sources, ground instrument readings, and satellite data, to calculate the total methane emissions from both leakage and flaring. 2. Calculate added emissions impact from the combined methane emissions. 3. Transfer the added emissions down the supply chain, from oil well to resellers to eventually the gas utilities. 4. At each stage, certify the quality of the natural gas based on the added methane emissions.
This project has grown from the two original developers to a larger group. Even though the developers are from around the world and have never met in person, they’re working together the open source way. Through Zoom calls, wiki pages, and shared code repositories, they’ve been building a prototype for the Hyperledger Global Challenge while interviewing industry members, data providers, and government regulators.
We would like to call your attention to the launch of the Hyperledger Governance,Risk and Compliance Special Interest Group (GRC SIG). The Hyperledger GRC SIG intends to focus on the adoption of blockchain technology in solving digital trust issues, making GRC practices more transparent, and simplifying the adoption by GRC practitioners.
Join us for our first meeting on February 9th, 9:30 PM IST/8 AM PST/4 PM GMT – Meeting Details
Technology has solved many legacy challenges, simplified processes and brought optimization, but, at the same time, it can add more complexities and expose to various risks if organizations don’t have expertise or adopted technologies in their nascent stage. With this SIG, we will help practitioners not just get familiarized with the technology but also assist in solving business trust issues by building decentralized GRC apps. We will also help them educate their organizations or customers about how to define the right set of controls to mitigate IT risk because of blockchain adoption.
To keep it simple, this group will explore using decentralized, permissioned Hyperledger blockchain technology to build applications that will streamline the way global organizations run their GRC practices. Blockchain has a huge potential for building trust and improving data accessibility by maintaining transparency along with cryptographic hash security. The SIG will discuss and explore the following relevant technologies:
Hyperledger Fabric and other Hyperledger umbrella projects for GRC
Tokenomics
DAO and Distributed Governance Models
New Consensus Mechanisms
The Governance, Risk and Compliance process includes these three elements:
Governance is the oversight role and the process by which companies manage and mitigate business risks
Risk management enables an organization to evaluate all relevant business and regulatory risks and controls and monitor mitigation actions in a structured manner
Compliance ensures that an organization has the processes and internal controls to meet the requirements imposed by governmental bodies, regulators, industry mandates, or internal policies.
As part of this SIG, we will explore the areas within GRC space where blockchain can play a crucial role. For example, blockchain can help with digital trust in third party partnerships. It can also promote adoption of technology for IT auditing, organization and regulatory compliance when it comes to blockchain-based enterprise solutions, crypto and NFTs, transparent Environment Social Governance aspects, and more
To make this group successful, we would be happy to work with enthusiastic developers, students, GRC practitioners and all manner of professionals to take this SIG forward and make it into an industry standard.
Visit our GRC SIG wiki page to learn more details about the SIG’s charter and how to get involved. We encourage you to join this community by visiting the links below:
We are excited to launch GRC SIG and are looking forward to collaborating with you. Come join us at the launch event on February 9th, 9:30 PM IST/8 AM PST/4 PM GMT! Find meeting details here.
This four-part series is aimed at using the open source and collaborative nature of blockchain to tackle issues plaguing human consumption and improve society for future generations. We hope that this series can invoke quick movement on use cases with high potential to improve social good.
In Part I we looked at how governments can create markets to solve recycling contamination and reward citizensviablockchain. This engages consumers, reduces confusion and boosts recycling participation. Part II (below) focuses on using blockchain to track hazardous and toxic materials from the point of purchase to ensure proper material handling to prevent fires, death, and pollution. Part III looks at government tax credits to expedite the adoption of recycling and composting programs by communities and businesses, while using blockchain to verify compliance, traceability, and program participation. Lastly, in Part IV we will discuss Zero Waste initiatives that cities, businesses, and facilities can implement to reduce the carbon and pollutant impact of their supply chains.
Part II Tracking Hazardous and Toxic Materials
Pollution, Chemicals, and Fires
Pollution is the presence of some materials in the environment and the state of the natural environment being contaminated with potentially harmful substances as an outcome of human activities. Annually, there are over 4.2 million deaths due to outdoor air pollution. Water pollution caused 1.8 million deaths in 2015. As of September 2021, nearly 300 million tons of hazardous waste has been thrown out globally since the beginning of this year alone! Human consumption can cause substantial harm to our health leading to chronic diseases, environmental harms, and death. In addition, studies show that toxic chemicals are invading our bodies and breast-feeding women are passing these toxic chemicals on to their babies. These chemicals can cause cancer and reproductive issues, damage DNA, and disrupt hormone systems of animals and people, among a myriad of other risks.
Indeed, human consumption directly impacts our air, water, and soil throughout the entire product supply chain. From the extraction of raw materials to the manufacturing processes, transportation, distribution, storage, consumption, and ultimate disposal of materials in landfills and incinerators, each step of the chain releases carbon, chemicals, and other pollutants into groundwater, toxify the earth’s soil, and pollutes our air. However, for this specific blog, we are focusing on the end of the supply chain, looking at how we can keep potentially hazardous and toxic materials in circulation while minimizing impact by enforcing the proper disposal of these materials.
On the bright side, controlling pollution and human consumption has a great return on investment. According to the Lancet Commission on Health, the global economic costs of pollution are massive, totaling “$4.6 trillion per year—6.2% of global economic output.” In the United States, air pollution control pays off at a rate of 30-1. Every dollar invested in air pollution control generates thirty dollars of benefits. Since 1970, the United States has invested around $65 billion in air pollution control and received around $1.5 trillion in benefits. Indeed, hazardous materials have the potential to desperately impact vulnerable communities, but the efforts to control them also provide an opportunity to create jobs, improve health, and create economic opportunity.
Fires
Do you know where to recycle/properly dispose of your electronics, chemicals, and other hazardous materials? Do you know if your trash or recycling was the cause of a fire? Improper disposal of dangerous material can lead to fires that occur in collection trucks, trash cans and dumpsters, or a recycling, landfill, or incineration facility. For example, lithium ion batteries in electronics can cause fires that ignite nearby materials creating an uncontrollable blaze. These fires often require the fire station to put them out and result in additional chemicals such as Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) to be released into the environment.This further pollutes our air, water, and soil. Even when people know about the dangers, processes to motivate consumers and inspire behavior change are lacking. Further, because of the vast amount of materials in our supply chains, it is complicated to know what to dispose of where, and what can be potentially dangerous to frontline workers and vulnerable communities.
The scenario below provides greater detail using an example from our household electronics.
Scenario #2 Harry’s Hazardous Mishap
Let’s assume Harry just broke his new electronic device that contains a lithium-ion battery. Instead of taking it to a local electronics retailer, the local hazardous recycling center, or having it collected, he tosses the device into his trash can. On garbage day, the garbage collector (Wanda Worker) arrives, uses the claw to collect Harry’s trash and is off to the next home. It is a hot day. About thirty minutes later, Wanda is almost done with her route and begins to head back to dump her truckload. She looks in her sideview mirrors and begins to see smoke billowing out of her truck. She radios into dispatch that she might have a problem. Quickly the smoke starts to increase, and Wanda is forced to dump her truckload for her own safety, to protect the vehicle, and even prevent an explosion from occurring. Dispatch calls emergency services, and a firetruck and ambulance arrive shortly to put out the fire and check on Wanda.
A scenario like this happened as recently as May of this year in Manassas, Virginia. Find a news link here. Find the tweet here. The article also reports that there was a fire at the Material Recovery Facility as well earlier in the week. Two fires in one week! On July 7, 2021, a Waste Management vehicle caught fire in Oregon. This electronics recycling problem is not siloed to the United States; here is a video from a fire in Australia:
The statistics are not crystal clear on how many fires occur due to people improperly disposing of materials, but it has been reported that there are over 8,000 landfill fires occur annually. Humans have more and more devices in our home, and we must take special precautions when handling them at the end of life. Fires caused by batteries, devices and related materials are just one example. There are other chemical instances, such as paints, heavy metals and other substances that might not spark a fire, but are toxic when disposed of and can ultimately enter our groundwater supply. For example, when it rains on landfills, the rain can flush these chemicals into our water supply as leachate.
When businesses dump hazardous waste, there are often repercussions. For instance, Home Depot was fined $27.84 million in California for improperly disposing of hazardous waste. However, consumer enforcement is much more difficult, costly, and essentially non-existent as it requires a manual inspection of thousands of trash and recycling containers. In addition, there are privacy concerns surrounding people inspecting trash and recycling. In some cases, it could be ruled an invasion of privacy, whereas in other areas private receptacles are subject to inspection.
So where does blockchain come into play? Blockchain creates new models for ensuring that these hazardous items never end up in the wrong place and that those creating dangerous and unsafe workplaces for frontline workers, toxifying our water supply and contributing to air and soil pollution are held accountable. Dangerous and hazardous materials can be tracked from the point of purchase and verified once the person disposes of them in the proper location. This material list could range from electronics to chemicals and any other poisonous or toxic material. A discount or other brand powered incentive could encourage people to properly handle and dispose of these types of materials. Essentially, it would amount to a brand-powered “bottle” bill for hazardous and dangerous materials, which result in fires, groundwater contamination and air pollution, especially in vulnerable communities.
Chem Chain is a company that focuses on tracking the chemicals contained in products to educate consumers on the risks that exist throughout the supply chain and looks at the impact of the products we use on a daily basis. Deloitte also provided some guidance on how blockchain can be used to tackle these issues in the chemical industry supply chain.
The IBM Food Trust certification program could also be a model for tracking hazardous waste. It even provides a roadmap for monitoring and measuring the overall impact of individual consumers disposing of materials properly and the economic savings from reduced fires, pollution, and safety issues that are created by toxic and hazardous materials.
By requiring certificates on a blockchain chain powered by the state or federal government, municipalities and other entities could issue licenses for these types of household electronics from the point of purchase. The license would mandate that they can’t be disposed of in the trash or recycling. Instead, they must be dropped off at a collection site, to ensure that the materials are properly handled. Indeed, this could create a market for licensed material collectors to handle materials on an ad-hoc personalized basis from consumers homes and create more public awareness around this ever present issue..
Programs like this can encourage individuals to purchase more sustainable and circular products. But, in the case where these metals and lithium-ion batteries cannot be avoided, at least we can ensure Wanda Worker gets home to her family safely as the public becomes motivated to get educated and do the right thing.
The purpose of these blogs is to stir ideas and innovation in the circular economy to better understand the current interactions of material life cycles. The Hyperledger Social Impact Group hopes that these blogs can create interest for:
· Focusing on clean air, water, soil, by increasing material collection efficiently and eliminating waste.
· Calculating product lifecycles for consumers and business materials.
· Analyzing political, economic, social, and practical blockchain applications.
· Building proof-of-concept applications to demo for stakeholders.
If you want to be part of the discussion or, even better, help build solutions that reduce the impact of hazardous materials disposal, please check out the Hyperledger Social Impact SIG new member center. Or subscribe to the Social Impact SIG mailing list for updates and meeting notifications.
Leaders from Trade Finance, Capital Markets, Climate Action and Accounting, Media and Entertainment, Public Sector, Social Impact, Supply Chain and Telecom Special Interest Groups; Identity, Learning Materials and Development, Performance & Scale and Learning Materials Development Working Groups; and the Italian, Latin America and India Chapters agree:
“We are unearthing ways in which we can better collaborate to overcome today’s and future cross industry challenges by identifying and contributing heterogeneous expertise, leveraging technology for the betterment of society, unifying open communities under Hyperledger.”
Signatories:
Why?
The Hyperledger Special Interest Groups (SIGs) were initially focused on specific business areas such as Trade Finance (TF), Supply Chain (SC), Healthcare (H), Telecom (T), and Capital Markets (CM). These groups evolved separately and went through their own independent cycles of growth. These SIGs regularly hosted presentations about ways their industries and business domains leveraged open source protocols and software to deliver solutions that overcame their respective challenges.
Gradually, some individual SIGs came together organically and dynamically. In 2020, the Capital Markets SIG and Trade Finance SIG produced an exhaustive and comprehensive picture of the Chinese blockchain infrastructure for Trade and Trade Finance.
In March 2021, Trade Finance SIG and Capital Markets SIG met formally for the very first time to plan collaboration in earnest. That meeting sparked an inner debate within the Trade Finance SIG about how different SIGs in the Hyperledger ecosystem could further collaborate. Perhaps it is natural that large-scale collaboration started with trade finance as, thanks to its hybrid nature, it is intimately connected with many other branches of human activity.
Observations emerged from these initial meetings within the Trade Finance SIG and from initial collaboration with other Hyperledger SIGs that could serve as a role model for future and further open engagement throughout the Hyperledger SIGs.
It became clear that we cannot promote decentralization while locking ourselves in silos. We cannot promote decentralization while imposing singular perspectives on the world. We need collaboration, open communication, and strong connections among Hyperledger communities as we look for solutions to enable interoperability and standards at business and technical levels.
The Hyperledger communities should focus on finding new opportunities that support global adoption of blockchain. Intra WGs, SIGs and Chapters collaboration is a natural step forward identifying opportunities to accelerate that adoption. The goal is to discuss, create or adopt technical, business, legal and regulatory standards that may redefine common global practices for a harmonized worldwide adoption and come up with a set of shared, mutually accepted regulatory framework for the industries to innovate.
Blockchain-based ecosystems are virtual places where members come together to be part of an evolution or indeed a revolution in business practices. Hyperledger has always strived to be a neutral reference point that leverages the expertise of their participants.
We face global events that stimulate or accelerate technological advancements and the need for solutions to resolve some of the world’s most urgent problems—from climate change and sustainability, green initiatives including green trade and logistics, healthcare, provenance, security and privacy. We are uniquely positioned to break the silos and combine our thoughts, ideas and effort in a concerted way to solve these problems.
The creation of a Hyperledger Collaboration Working Group will break the silos through intentional collaboration starting a convergence of the Hyperledger ecosystem addressing large-scale real world problems. This new Working Group echoes the goal of the Linux Foundation itself: “Unlocking the value of shared technology.” Representatives from these groups will meet on a quarterly basis to achieve the goal of open collaboration.
Our Call to Action is for you to participate, get involved, contribute where you can and help us achieve our goal. We encourage the community to roll up its collective sleeves and take on this challenge. A good place to start is the event named “Breaking the silos” that will take place on June 15th.
The Hyperledger Climate Action & Accounting Special Interest Group (CA2SIG) is part of a growing ecosystem of innovators that is working to make global climate accounting a reality. We are an Open Source group working with a community of talented professionals that are tackling the technologies, frameworks, standards, partnerships, and use cases it will take to get there. With the support and know-how from community members such as the Linux Foundation, Open Earth Foundation and Climate Chain Coalition, we are making good progress, but we need your help. Whether you are a blockchain developer, product manager, research, analyst or subject matter expert in policy, environment, industry, etc., there is a role for you to play. We invite you to join us and take part in catalysing the most radical collaborative movement in human history, one that will help facilitate the investment of $50 trillion dollars over the next 30 years to secure the future of humanity.
Here are a five ways you can get involved:
Join the Standards Working Group to help design and implement the “protocols and standards” needed to ensure that climate accounting data can function as part of a global interoperable layer of information sharing. This group is actively looking for real use cases to design for and test against.
Join the Consumer Disclosure Working Group to create solutions to help make consumers aware of the environmental impact they make in their daily lives. This group is currently developing a data-driven sustainability score for companies and consumers to help quantify how sustainable a product really is. This group is actively looking for a company or companies to partners with to develop a real world proof of concept.
Join the Operating System for Climate Action to help build tools to record emissions (right now from energy data from utility bills) and allow emissions and offsets to be tokenized and traded. This group is also working to build a Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) to allow users to vote collectively on climate action. (Read more about this effort here: Help Us Scale Up Our Operating System for Climate Action.)
Take a leadership role by taking on one of the blockchain projects listed on the Project Ideas Board. The Climate Action & Accounting SIG and Hyperledger Labs are here to provide support to help you launch any new project. Take a moment to explore some of the projects that are waiting for leadership:
Finally, if you have your own idea for an Open Source climate project, click here to share it with us, and we can work with you to explore how we can help you find the support and expertise you need to get started.
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:
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.
This will familiarize us with the carbon accounting tool on a code level and highlight potential feature gaps of Hyperledger Cactus itself.
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.
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:
With your help, we hope to see these outcomes from our action plan:
Lead by example and by doing what we can.
Make the work on the carbon accounting tool easier/faster by leveraging Hyperledger Cactus.
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.
