VeChain launches Digital Carbon Footprint SaaS platform
Climate change has been top of mind for many recently, especially with the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) report highlighting how, already, “greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere are high enough to guarantee climate disruption for decades if not centuries.”
When it comes to the environment, cryptocurrencies typically get a bad rap, often due to the energy consumption required for proof of work protocols. However, there are many ways that crypto and blockchain can play an important role in the fight against climate change. In fact, the United Nations recognized this in a recent report, stating:
The negative environmental impact of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin has been widely covered in the press in recent weeks and months, and their volatility has also been flagged as a cause for concern. Nevertheless, the UN believes that blockchain, the technology lying behind these online currencies, could be of great benefit to those fighting the climate crisis, and help bring about a more sustainable global economy.
Furthermore, Alexandre Gellert Paris, Associate Programme Officer at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change noted:
Blockchain could contribute to greater stakeholder involvement, transparency and engagement and help bring trust and further innovative solutions in the fight against climate change, leading to enhanced climate actions.
VeChain has demonstrated one use case for blockchain in the fight against climate change with the recent launch of its Digital Carbon Footprint SaaS platform. According to the VeChain Foundation:
VeChain’s brand new Digital Carbon Footprint SaaS Service is a powerful, rapidly deployable tool, enabling enterprises of all sizes to re-engineer their carbon footprint data management practices. This new offering is also the first of its kind to benefit from the combination of decentralized ledger technology and an SaaS business model.
This platform provides a practical solution to the challenge of unverifiable data that often comes with environmental reporting. Whether it’s reporting one’s carbon emissions, the amount of bycatch in their fishing operations, or whether produce meets organic certification standards, it can be hard to independently verify data, especially with so many moving parts in complex supply chains.
VeChain’s platform, on the other hand “allows enterprise users to log key data and integrate it with world-leading third party assurance providers within VeChain’s partnership network”. Through every step of the supply chain, users can enter data, which is stored on the blockchain, and enables organizations to see their impact across the entirety of the process from production, to delivery, to sale.
This is one small example of the potential of blockchain to help in the fight against climate change and is certainly not the first either. At the same time, this concept could easily be applied to a number of supply chain contexts, to help corporations truly understand the impact of their production processes, while increasing accountability through the use of data that id trustworthy and can be independently verified.
What do you think of VeChain’s new Digital Carbon Footprint SaaS platform? How could it be applied in other contexts? Tweet us at @Crypto_Altruism, we’d love to hear from you!
