This year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, which took place from January 16 to January 20, saw top leaders and decision-makers from government, business, and academics converge to address major global issues and priorities. Hedera was a major presence in 2023, and the panel on “The Future of Emissions'' hosted at Hedera Haus discussed the urgent challenge of reducing and removing carbon emissions from our atmosphere to slow and mitigate the worst effects of climate change. Thought leaders from the Global Blockchain Business Council, Hedera, The HBAR Foundation, ServiceNow, and DLA Piper, amongst other key industry players, spoke to the innovative approaches and real-world solutions now being developed and deployed in the web3 space.
With a focus on progress made since 2020, the panel discussion centered around creating blockchain and DLT standards that enable the climate outcomes necessary for a sustainable future. Panelists emphasized the need for continued collaboration and unity among all stakeholders and discussed key examples of deployments of these standards through applications on Hedera.
A key technology powering Hedera’s utility for sustainability is the open-source Guardian, a next-generation tool for digitizing environmental methodologies to enable streamlined digital measurement, reporting, and verification linked to a series of unique digital environmental assets.
According to Wes Geisenberger, VP of Sustainability & ESG at The HBAR Foundation, “You can't understand the impact on climate without understanding your impact personally, your company's impact, your organization's reach into other organizations, the impact on the entire value chain as carbon emissions are one part of the liabilities or unmeasured externalities. Traditionally, we have ignored these in the world, and we had to find a way to measure them in a credible way that gives auditability, and information discoverability, in a way where transparent actions can happen. So, if you do want to offset or take responsibility for those liabilities, you can do so and understand you're covering the whole process.”
Overall, Hedera enables the creation of decentralized applications that support various aspects of regenerative finance (ReFi) including sustainable debt, such as green bonds & carbon forwards, measurement, reporting, and verification of environmental impact, and facilitating the trade of regenerative finance assets. Hedera's technology can also be used to track ESG data transparently to ensure correct and robust information disclosure on environmental footprints and their associated methodologies that are reported to both government regulators and reporting standards such as the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP). To learn more about ways applications are building in the ecosystem check out the HBAR Foundation Sustainable Impact Fund’s 5 Goals and learn more about how they apply to Regenerative Finance:
Making Climate Finance Auditable
Digitizing & Open Sourcing Methodologies
Scaling Validation & Verification
Discovering a Global Climate Asset Price
Making ESG Reporting Credible
In addition, by using the Guardian, buyers of carbon credits and other natural capital assets will have access for the first time not only to underlying rulesets but every role, actor, measurement, and data point linked to the given unique assets, resulting in far higher levels of trust and confidence in asset quality.
The Guardian is helping the Hedera ecosystem achieve one of its core environmental goals: accelerating the voluntary carbon, biodiversity, and other ecological asset markets by the scaling validation and verification processes that support them – processes that are currently slow, infrequent, analog, subject to human error, and affected by legal and regulatory fragmentation. Hedera seeks to enhance asset verification's transparency, accuracy, and context by bringing the verification process to a public ledger.
As a breakthrough decentralized public ledger, Hedera offers a plethora of innovative solutions to leverage regenerative finance. From tokenizing assets like land, crops, and energy production to increase investment opportunities to providing traceability and transparency through its blockchain technology to mitigate risk and improve investment capital flow.
Arising at the forefront of sustainable innovation, Global Blockchain Business Council (GBBC) is taking proactive steps toward establishing a robust supply-side framework for carbon emissions tokenization. To further advance sustainable transformation, GBBC has launched the Blockchain for Climate Initiative (BXC) to develop standards and a common language for the blockchain, Web2, and Web3 ecosystems. The initiative aims to bring together various stakeholders to work towards a more sustainable future, utilizing blockchain technology to tackle our most significant environmental challenge.
Hedera joined GBBC three years ago and has contributed to developing the blueprint for reducing carbon emissions. The company's expertise and experience have played a critical role in shaping the direction of GBBC's efforts toward creating a more sustainable future. Furthermore, the Voluntary Ecological Markets Task Force, operating under the GBBC, has been closely examining the significance of measurement, reporting, and verification in voluntary ecological markets. To streamline this transition, one of the core dilemmas within the Task Force revolves around the interplay between fungibility and behavior.
Since the open-source nature of the Task Force's work is vital to its success, a thriving community is required for the project and to bring larger enterprises on board. Nevertheless, the Task Force recognizes the importance of running a successful business and acknowledges the presence of competitive relationships within the community.
In addition, the Task Force launched its Token Taxonomy Framework, which serves as a foundational structure for supporting business use cases. Since then, the group has been driving implementation and encouraging members to utilize the framework in their respective marketplaces.
ServiceNow is transforming how enterprise organizations operate by harnessing the power of the cloud and the latest in automation technology. Its platform streamlines and automates routine work tasks, helping to boost operational efficiency and minimize the risk of human error.
By integrating Hedera's DLT into its platform, ServiceNow has the potential to greatly increase the adoption and use of blockchain in a wide range of industries. The company's IT platform has a large customer base, with 80% adoption among Fortune 500 companies in the United States and similarly high levels of adoption in other countries. This widespread use of ServiceNow's platform has the potential to bring blockchain to the masses and make it accessible to a broader audience.
Furthermore, ServiceNow is also working to integrate Hedera to generate carbon credits in Australia with Natural Carbon. The project aims to create fully trusted, and transparent digital versions of Australian Carbon Credit Units produced from Savannah back burning. Deploying blockchain technology's secure and tamper-proof nature, the partnership aims to create a truly trusted and transparent process for carbon credit generation.
Through its innovative use of Hedera DLT, ServiceNow has the potential to be a significant accelerator for the growth and development of the sustainability ecosystem. Enabled by Hedera’s technological advent, ServiceNow can play a crucial role in advancing the sustainability ecosystem. Hence, Hedera's technology can help companies increase transparency and accountability in their sustainability initiatives and provide them with a more efficient and secure way to track and manage their sustainability data.
Nicola Attico, Blockchain & DLT Solution Engineer in the Innovation & Strategy Office of ServiceNow, explains the over-encompassing process of working in open source: “It’s key to be fast in bringing big enterprise on board with emissions tracking and proper offsetting. Our mission is to help track emissions properly by leveraging the ESG management and reporting solution that’s powered by ServiceNow”.
DLA Piper, a global law firm, has partnered with Hedera Hashgraph to build enterprise-grade applications using blockchain technology. DLA Piper's interest in Hedera Hashgraph was driven by the network's ability to solve limitations that other blockchain networks, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, faced, such as slow transaction speeds, lack of scalability, and slow consensus finality.
Since 2019, DLA Piper has been building a multi-disciplinary start-up within its organization to help progress the way they do business. DLA Piper joined the Hedera Governing Council to participate in the decision-making processes, growth, and future of a network they believe in. As a Council member, DLA Piper took on the liability of being part owner in the Hedera Hashgraph LLC and operated a Hedera mainnet node, which processes transactions and contributes bandwidth, computing, and storage to the network in return for compensation in the network's native HBAR cryptocurrency.
In a conversation preceded by Nilmini Rubin, Chief Policy Officer of Hedera, Andy Gastwirth, Chief Innovation Office of DLA Piper, emphasizes that “We are used to seeing the blockchain through the land, so actually, technology as a multi-master state machine application mechanism that allows us to shift consensus of different things and these things can be digitized.”
Daniel O'Halloran, the CEO and Executive Chairman of TYMLEZ, discussed TYMLEZ solutions on Hedera and the work the team has done over the last year using the Hedera Guardian for Guarantee of Origin for green products, such as sustainable aviation fuel, the maritime industry, renewable energy certificates, and carbon credits.
Hedera is leveraged in its business to provide provenance and trust in green attributes for products like sustainable aviation fuel, marine fuel, and carbon credits and their associated environmental projects. Ultimately, TYMLEZ focuses on generating digital assets and creating a trust chain via the Open Source Guardian to provide transparency and trust in the production of climate assets.
In this regard, the maritime industry constituted a significant area of focus and the need for standardization to provide confidence in the authenticity of climate assets and the green attributes of products.
One area of focus for Hedera is the development of carbon emissions tokens and standards to achieve both organizational Net Zero and country-level commitments via Nationally Determined Contributions through nested accounting of climate assets. Members of the Hedera community participate in the Global Blockchain Business Council Carbon Emissions Taskforce, chaired by Ernst & Young and the HBAR Foundation Sustainable Impact Fund, which helps define standards that are used in the implementation of tokenized carbon emissions and improves interoperability across companies using public ledgers in accounting for Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions. The goal is to create transparent and trustworthy digital assets that can encourage investment in ecological projects that are able to be used in a way that improves the integrity in climate markets. Hedera is also expanding its methodology library to include biodiversity and other areas of natural capital accounting to promote open-source, digitized, and scalable methodologies for these applications.
With the blockchain providing a secure and transparent ledger, Hedera pursues initiatives that aim to bring the world closer to a greener and cleaner future, where the impact of human activities on the environment can be effectively monitored and reduced where possible. Startups, enterprises, and government organizations are building the next generation of sustainability solutions on Hedera. Join the fast-growing Hedera sustainability ecosystem.