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

这个小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第二阶段项目的更广泛/商业影响集中在它对协调政府、行业和个人的气候变化缓解表现以实现负碳未来的潜在贡献。该项目正在发展的碳跟踪和可视化自动化系统可以使其与许多组织联网，这些组织正试图在可核实的地图上开展碳减排活动，协调其他不同的努力。在世界试图解决全球气候变化问题之际，区域、国家和全球协调非常重要。拟议的平台不仅设想在全球一级汇总多部门信息，还允许组织之间通过分享碳目标和通过碳地役权或信用额度进行脱碳投资进行合作。该解决方案还将实体或区域层面的碳足迹与全球碳使用量和全球碳边界联系起来。这一用于协调的可视化工具预计将有助于加快可持续发展领域的公私伙伴关系，帮助组织围绕资源管理进行合作，并通过连接支持经济活动和创造就业机会。这项研究的技术创新是将所有同时进行的、多层次的脱碳努力可视化地协调到一张地图上。区域协调仍然是广泛采取气候行动的最大障碍之一。即使在推行县级气候行动计划时，县内的城市也可能不会均衡地执行目标，因为资源分配往往存在不平等。同样，行业内部往往缺乏协调；公司可能在绘制范围数据方面遇到困难，更不用说与其他行业合作了。该项目可能会通过公开展示潜在合作伙伴的目标和轨迹，使公司和政府更容易进行合作。提供经过验证的足迹的公司可能具有更全面的数据、更准确的数据和向他们提供建议的优势。在这项研究中，该团队打算为用户制定碳负预算，规划过去和未来的碳使用情况，自动化排放数据上传，为用户的内部设施或资产构建地图，并为用户探索支持平台上碳交易的解决方案方案。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.