Open Climate

* Whitepaper: Open Climate. Leveraging blockchain for a global, transparent and integrated climate accounting system. By Martin E. Wainstein.

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Abstract

The Open Climate Project is an open source initiative exploring the application of distributed ledger technology (DLT) and other emerging technologies, such as IoT (Internet of Things), big data and machine learning, to the challenge of helping the world keep a transparent climate accounting system towards the climate targets set in the 2015 Paris Agreement — i.e. maintaining anthropogenic warming below 1.5oC. Global climate accounting, the process of recording climate actors and their actions in respect to the shared account of the planet’s climate state, occurs in diverse set of registry platforms that are individually centralized and collectively dispersed and unlinked.

This is often due to lack of trust between actors, resisting to share data that exposes them to scrutiny.

This project involves a software ‘platform of platforms,’ distinguished here as the Open Climate1 platform, the development of climate communication protocols, and a shared user interface as portal to the system. The platform acts as a common integrator that can reconcile climate records and functions from both legacy and DLT-based climate platforms in the pursuit of helping maintain a decentralized ‘ledger of ledgers’. With climate actors and their associated records mapped in a shared network— ranging from countries, to companies to individuals — DLT and other cryptographic tools are primarily used to: provide general transparency alongside individual data privacy, prevention of double counting in the digital certification and trading of climate actions, and a platform for contractual automation of rules and mechanisms with financial nature; from Paris Agreement stocktakes to carbon pricing and rewards for mitigation outcomes.

We present here the architecture for the Open Climate platform as well as describe its full stack prototype.

Whilst the platform is currently incubated at the Yale Open Innovation Lab (openlab) it combines multiple other platforms in advanced technological stages; incubated and developed by a growing network of collaborators. For the combined development, the open climate project adopts a multi-stakeholder open innovation framework and consortium to actualize this ambitious endeavor through radical collaboration."

Status

• The Open Climate platform, portal and integration protocols are in an alpha prototype phase. Platform can be accessed at www.openclimate.earth