DigitalMRV Gets a Boost from Dell and Google.org

IOTA and ClimateCHECK Welcome Google.org Funding with Gold Standard; Dell Collaborates with DigitalMRV to Integrate Data Confidence Fabric

TL;DR:
Open Collaboration co-founders ClimateCHECK, IOTA Foundation and Gold Standard welcome Google.org funding to support the 2022 work program. Also, Dell Technologies collaborates with the IOTA Foundation and ClimateCHECK to integrate the Data Confidence Fabric into Digital MRV (measurement, reporting and verification), enabling unprecedented transparency and methodological rigor for trusted data supporting green claims.

As co-founders of the Open Collaboration including Gold Standard, ClimateCHECK and IOTA Foundation are excited it has been announced today that Google.org is helping to fund the 2022 work program with a $1 million grant.

The Open Collaboration was announced by IOTA Foundation, ClimateCHECK and Gold Standard during COP26 last year with the mission to launch an extensive multi-stakeholder effort to develop governance and digital innovations to build trust and empower stakeholders to help scale the resources and actions needed to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The Open Collaboration believes that digital innovations must be combined with governance innovations to enable systemic transformational change. This belief dates back to COP21 in 2015 when ClimateCHECK first became a strong advocate for such governance innovations and it is encouraging that several new initiatives are also focusing on governance in support of digital for climate and sustainability – for example, the Vera Digital MRV Working Group, Coalition for Digital Environmental Sustainability (CODES) and the Carbon Transparency Partnership."

Furthermore, since 2015 at a COP21 event on Next Generation Governance, ClimateCHECK has authored several reports about how governance can enable digital innovations to have a transformational effect on climate and sustainability (see list at end of this document): these reports form the basis for the original design of the Open Collaboration.

About the Open Collaboration

The funding support from Google.org validates the Open Collaborations' commitment to both governance innovation and next-generation digital solutions for measurement, reporting and verification (MRV). This commitment is summed up by the guiding core principles of the Collaboration, including:

An ecosystem built with open source and public good approaches
Robust, transparent governance
An inclusive, participatory global community
Interoperability for the Digital and Data Economy
Cost-effective solutions (for example, feeless transactions)
Technologies that are low energy use and low environmental footprint

The Google.org grant also affirms the Open Collaboration’s multi-stakeholder approach: ClimateCHECK and the IOTA Foundation have established pedigree with multi-stakeholder processes that will be leveraged with the Open Collaboration, including longtime involvement with major networks such as the Climate Chain Coalition, INATBA, World Bank, ITU, ISO, Hyperledger, LFEdge Project Alvarium, European Blockchain Services Infrastructure, Imperial College London for Circular Economy, TMForum, CityxChange and CODES.

Read the Open Collaboration whitepaper here.

DigitalMRV + Data Confidence Fabric = Game Changer

The Open Collaboration is committed to digital solutions for measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) of climate and sustainability. MRV is an important part of the global response to climate change, enabling countries to meet international requirements around carbon credits and certification. In 2020, ClimateCHECK and the IOTA Foundation launched DigitalMRV, built on the IOTA distributed ledger technology (DLT) to provide a solution to the too-often disjointed, complex and even manually executed nature of today’s MRV (read more about DigitalMRV here.) DigitalMRV is already being deployed in Chile to enhance accountability and transparency of GHG reductions from a Biodigester project.

This year, DigitalMRV is reaching an important milestone with the integration of the Data Confidence Fabric (DCF) in collaboration with Dell Technologies. The DCF provides a measurable way of evaluating confidence in data before it is used by an application: an important way to guarantee the data trust that is imperative to organizations today. It was first introduced by Dell Technologies in 2019 before being re-engineered using the increased security and scalability of the IOTA Streams framework. The integration of DCF into DigitalMRV enables unprecedented transparency and methodological rigor for trusted data supporting green claims; we’ll explore the impact in depth in a follow-up blog post.

As a nonprofit foundation behind an open-source and sustainable Distributed Ledger Technology, the IOTA Foundation is very pleased to continue its work with ClimateCHECK and Gold Standard on the Open Collaboration.

For more information on the use of distributed ledger technology in sustainability and MRV, check out the following: