Overcoming the dual crises of climate change and greenwashing with DigitalMRV
IOTA’s Chrysalis and Green IT ecosystem enables transformational change towards sustainable and regenerative practices
Key messages:
- IOTA[1] is very low power consumption[2] and avoids the unsustainable carbon footprint of Bitcoin[3] or Ethereum[4] (no need to spend extra money to build and buy more green power just for energy-voracious blockchains that could be used otherwise)
- DigitalMRV[5] is powered by IOTA to digitize measurement, reporting and verification of sustainability performance to help stop the greenwashing crisis (fake green news) and solve the crisis of confidence in sustainable solutions
- IOTA’s Chrysalis[6] upgrade will accelerate deployment of sustainability innovations that unite people, open-source technologies for social impact.
Enthusiastic programs for Earth Day 2021, including also the Leaders Summit for Climate to be hosted by U.S. President Biden, focus attention on the need to implement ambitious policies and transformational solutions to help restore the earth for future generations to flourish sustainably. Digital transformation is often considered an essential part of the path forward[7],[8].
Indeed, many working to solve the climate crisis have expectations for digital solutions (1) to generate trusted data and automate the analytics to support better and more climate-smart decision-making[9], and (2) to achieve at least 15% of the GHG emission reduction goals of the UN Paris Agreement on climate change by increasing resource efficiency including saving energy[10].
Yet there are more and more reports about greenwashing[11] — bogus and unsubstantiated claims about environmental impacts — that have become so bad that the government are passing laws that will levy fines on greenwashers[12]. That’s a good reason to implement digital MRV solutions, that are themselves also climate-smart.
Climate-smart digital solution?
Although there’s lots of attention on transformative technologies to solve the climate crisis, despite numerous energy efficiency improvements[13] the energy consumption of digital solutions continues to increase significantly[14]. The unsustainable carbon footprint of blockchain which has been reported for years[15] by numerous studies was again recently in the spotlight[16],[17]. Many stakeholders are understandably disillusioned with the potential of digital solutions, including blockchain, as the planet’s savior.
But not all blockchains are the same, actually, distributed ledger technologies (“DLTs”) like the IOTA Tangle which is a Directed Acyclic Graph (“DAG”) are not built like blockchains that have an unsustainable carbon footprint like Bitcoin or Ethereum. Although there are emerging initiatives to deal with the crazy level of carbon emissions of blockchains by buying renewable energy[18], IOTA was designed to be very low power use and for smart decentralization.
