Carbon credits, which represent the price of reducing or offsetting a unit of carbon dioxide, have been an important tool for companies working to improve sustainability and reduce their environmental footprint. Carbon credits are an imperfect metric, however, because they don’t account for the full scope of social and economic ramifications caused by carbon emissions.
The social cost of carbon (SCC) was conceived to more accurately represent the true cost of damages caused by excess carbon emissions in order to drive more effective policies and initiatives that diminish the harmful effects of climate change. Blockchain and oracle technology can be used to create open-source digital systems that accelerate this effort.
OpenEarth Foundation is a not-for-profit using blockchain, IoT, and artificial intelligence technologies to build such systems. Last July, web3’s leading oracle service, Chainlink, awarded OpenEarth a Chainlink Community Grant to research and identify optimal integrated assessment models (IAMs) for SCC calculations to be delivered on-chain via a Chainlink oracle node.
This week, OpenEarth announced that it will release a Chainlink oracle that delivers advanced carbon pricing models to top blockchains.
“By dynamically leveraging the latest scientific models to provide accurate estimates of the social price of carbon, this carbon pricing oracle will enable organizations to better mitigate their climate impact by accurately pricing the social cost of their carbon emissions,” OpenEarth wrote on its website.
The Chainlink Carbon Pricing Oracle will be a key component of the carbon pricing web tool OpenEarth is building in collaboration with UC Berkeley. By using IAMs to calculate their internal carbon price based on a spectrum of social, policy, and economic variables alongside key business parameters, companies can implement more effective strategies for minimizing climate damage.
As foundational infrastructure for publishing more sophisticated carbon pricing models on-chain, Chainlink’s carbon pricing oracle is poised to help build more resilient carbon markets that automatically respond to social, economic, and environmental fluctuations. The oracle would allow existing web2 and web3 applications to build optimal low-carbon solutions while powering new applications that advance climate initiatives such as carbon-backed assets, climate accounting protocols, and corporate compliance systems.
In an official statement, Dr. Martin Wainstein, Founder and Executive Director of OpenEarth Foundation, summed up the positive impact he expects from Chainlink’s carbon pricing oracle.
“By developing a Chainlink oracle node, we’re able to deliver integrated assessment models on-chain that dynamically update to reflect changes such as an organization’s carbon emissions and the remaining atmospheric carbon budget. Ultimately, this helps unlock innovative finance and incentive schemes for climate solutions that enable organizations to mitigate the impact of climate change by fully internalizing the price of emitting carbon.”
To learn more about OpenEarth Foundation, visit their website and Twitter.
Join the waitlist to receive updates on OpenEarth’s oracle node launch.