SBIR Phase II: Development of a Distributed Ledger System to Track Environmental Sustainability

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The broader/commercial impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project centers around its potential contribution to the coordination of climate change mitigation performance of governments, industry, and individuals towards a carbon negative future. The automated system for carbon tracking and visualization that this project is evolving could allow it to network many organizations that are trying to pursue carbon reduction activities on a verifiable map, coordinating otherwise disparate efforts. Regional, national, and global coordination are important as the world attempts to solve the global climate change problem. The proposed platform not only envisions aggregate multisector information on the global level, it allows for collaboration among organizations by sharing carbon goals and decarbonization investments through carbon easements or credits. The solution also contextualizes carbon footprints on the entity or region-level within the planetary carbon usage and planetary carbon boundaries. This visualization tool used for coordination is expected to help accelerate public-private partnerships in the sustainability space, and help organizations collaborate around resource management, and support economic activities and job creation through connectivity. The technical innovation in this research is the visual coordination of all the simultaneous, multi-level, decarbonization efforts onto one map. Regional coordination remains one of the biggest obstacles to widespread climate action. Even when a county-level climate action plan is pursued, cities within the counties may not implement goals evenly, as there are often inequities in resource distribution. Similarly, there is often a lack of coordination within industries; Companies may have trouble mapping scope data, let alone collaborating with other industries. The project is likely to make collaborations more accessible for companies and governments by visualizing potential partners’ goals and trajectories publicly. Companies that provide verified footprints may have advantages of more thorough data, more accurate data, and recommendations offered to them. In this research, the team intends to pursue the development of a carbon negative budget for users, map out past and future carbon usage, automate emissions data uploads, build out maps for internal facilities or assets of a user, and build out a decarbonization model tool for users to explore solution scenarios enabling tokenized on-platform carbon trading.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.