Sustainability transformation
There is a bridge to cross today between analog and digital for all organizations involved in carbon verification processes, moving from certification standards to data-based verification infrastructures. For corporations, this is the sustainability revolution, and carbon markets are the first global enabler. It enables organizations to build new business models that are good for people, the planet, and their bottom line. For carbon credit verification organizations, this provides an excellent growth opportunity. However, with growth come challenges in an already challenging market.
Obstacles to sustainable and ethical growth in the carbon markets are often due to slow-moving and manual processes and challenges in overseeing a global and multi-stakeholder market. Inertia and lack of scalability often stem from the absence of proof of additionality, high costs related to data collection and organization, time-consuming and non-transparent verification models.
Therefore, the carbon market provides an excellent opportunity for the sustainability transformation of many organizations in building business models that improve climate action efficiency! With this opportunity comes a responsibility in creating infrastructures that are inclusive, trusted, and agile globally to include projects of all sizes and enable them to contribute to urgent climate action.
If not addressed, we risk excluding and negatively impacting many projects with co-benefits that are valuable contributors and promote greenwashing projects.
Technical infrastructure
Well-designed technical infrastructures are crucial to scaling up the carbon markets and improving climate action efficiency. Building systems that register the baseline of truth to measure the additional impact created through data points is instrumental in scaling and meeting the growing demand. Efficiency and effectiveness within the carbon verification standards can be achieved through an on-demand system, where customers and buyers can define the data sources to claim their carbon credit. This verification model is strengthened with external API and AI applications managed by smart contracts on the blockchain to issue a credit which consists of proof of carbon reduction.
Data-based verification
For the carbon and the further extended impact landscape to solidify its value, trust needs to be created in the market by enabling organizations to build an evidence-based protocol that verifies their claim of sustainability, whether this is the proof of carbon sinks absorption or the proof of changed human behavior in favor of the environment like taking the bicycle instead of the car.
Network-based technologies offer the ability to mimic ecosystems. Therefore, they provide an overview of the connection and impact for organizations and individuals on their behavior and decisions on the larger environment. Banking on automated impact reporting within networks, organizations can start improving their financial value-chains with sustainability and build new business models that are in service of the environment and further social ambitions.
These technical infrastructures offer the most opportunity for carbon market scaling, transparency, and accuracy. As the carbon markets are in a growth phase and scalability creates difficulty in ensuring quality and keeping up with the demand.
Implementing an eco-blockchain for traceability and certification can save over 10x the cost of the current certification process by using automatization in building smart contracts and automatically screening data to build self-verifying systems. Labeling data and digital identification allow auditors to trace back any data source to the point of origin. Therefore it holds a level of accountability and responsibility that is unexplored.
For established organizations, carbon markets serve as a bridge to improving climate action efficiency, helping them transform their business model. Only through a pre-defined protocol of proven additionality can these projects be qualified for carbon credits.
