Help Us Scale Up Our Operating System for Climate Action – Hyperledger Foundation

With the enormous challenge that climate change represents, Earth Day 2021 brings mixed feelings. On the one hand, we should all be encouraged by the growing commitments to climate action around the world. On the other hand, there is a huge amount of work to be done and there is the question about how much any one person can do to help.

As open source developers, we decided not to just sit and watch. Instead, we’re taking action where we can make the biggest impact. We are writing code and we invite you to join us!

Blockchain developers can get involved and help the Hyperledger Climate Action and Accounting Special Interest Group develop a carbon accounting tool that can answer questions such as: Can we trust the climate pledges made regularly by companies large and small? Are our cities really achieving their emissions targets? We invite you to help us use distributed ledger technology to solve some of these climate challenges.

We’re building a set of open source tools for an “operating system for climate action” in the blockchain-carbon-accounting lab. There are three key modules:

• An immutable data channel built with Hyperledger Fabric to record emissions data, using energy data from utility bills and audited emissions factors from the EPA and EEA.
• A tokens trading network built with the Ethereum ERC-1155 multi-token standard smart contracts that allow emissions and offsets to be tokenized and traded.
• A Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO) built with the Compound DAO to allow users to vote collectively on climate action. 

We recently deployed the Hyperledger Fabric utility emissions and Ethereum emissions tokens networks into production to track and offset our own emissions.

Figure 1. Hyperledger Fabric Explorer shows the Fabric Network for Recording Emissions 

Figure 2: An ERC-1155 token of actual emissions from a utility bill, tokenized using the Emissions Tokens Network deployed on xDai, an energy-efficient Ethereum Layer 2 network.

Figure 3: Details of the transactions of Emissions Token Network on xDai

Head to github to check out the code. You can see the network fully in action here:

Next, we plan to build a network that allows members to record and offset their emissions while validating carbon offsets through a DAO. As part of this project, we will be creating solutions to:

• Improve trust in emissions accounting by using real data and verified emissions factors.
• Validate carbon offsets efficiently through transparency and collective voting.
• Allow smaller projects to earn carbon offsets by reducing cost.

How You Can Get Involved

There are several ways to get involved with the blockchain-carbon-accounting lab:

1. Start by subscribing to the Climate SIG mailing list for updates and meeting notifications.
2. Join our bi-weekly Peer Programming Zoom call for developers on Mondays at 9 AM US Pacific time (UTC-07:00 America/Los Angeles.) Please check the calendar for the next call. 
3. Check out the good first issues from our blockchain-carbon-accounting in Hyperledger-labs and feel free to contribute a fix for one that looks interesting to you.
4. Apply to be a mentee for one of the four paid mentorship projects related to the lab to improve documentation, add automated testing, work on Fabric-Ethereum integration, and improve client side identity/security.

The Hyperledger community is doing other things to address climate change, so you are encouraged to check out all of the ways to get involved with the Climate Action and Accounting SIG.