 everyone. Thank you for joining us today for this panel. I'm delighted to have these three panelists today talking about the real work that they're doing to fight climate change. Very often people, when they think about blockchain, they ask us, is blockchain a solution looking for a problem? What you'll learn today from the panelists is that it isn't and that we are really solving some critical climate related items using blockchain and blockchain related technologies as well. So we have the panelists that come from a platform that is solving sustainability and we'll let everybody introduce themselves, their roles and their company. We have Kamalash here representing also a lot of work that's happening in Asia Pacific and Nancy who works for the government of British Columbia that really has shown and I hope that today you'll learn how much work and effort they have put into the projects that they've worked on. So Nancy, I'll start with you since you're over on that side. Yeah, thanks for joining us today. My name is Nancy Norris. I work for the government of British Columbia in Canada. I'm not going to go through my whole title because it's very wordy, but my team works on a project, a pilot project, called the Energy and Minds Digital Trust and we're using distributed ledger technology to enable natural resource operators within the province of British Columbia to pass on information about their sustainability performance. So in BC, we have an economy that in part is based on natural resource extraction. We also have very strong climate legislation and we are making investments in digital trust technology. So those three things combined really sort of moved us forward to work on this pilot where we're using a technology called verified credentials to enable companies to pass on information in a way that's trusted and secure. So the pilot itself is mapping an existing process that is a part of our legislation in British Columbia. Anyone who admits, emits GHGs over a particular threshold must report that to those emissions on an annual basis to the government. So what we're doing is piloting the use of digital credentials so that the auditor, the carbon auditor, issues one of these credentials. The holder of that credential is the mining operator or the natural gas operator and then the consumer of those credentials is in our pilot, it is the BC regulator, the climate action secretariat. We're also enabling those natural resource operators to be able to share that information with other end consumers of that data like voluntary climate accounting platforms, also digital markets that are springing up for responsibly sourced products. So we are really seeing this technology as an opportunity to allow BC operators to showcase all of the hard work that they're doing to reduce their carbon footprint on an annual basis. We'll also be extending it to other digital credentials around the social and governance side so of the ESG. So basically just the overall sustainability performance of mines and natural gas operators. Hi, I'm Kamlesh Nagware and I'm CTO at Estimate Future Tech is a high-pressure member company and I'm also active member in the high-pressure community since 2016 and core member of climate action accounting SIG which working on such kind of projects and initiatives in the climate action. So we are doing couple of projects in India especially for the kind of plastic recycling. So like how the plastic is recycled and how you could do the carbon emission footprint and then tokenizing those kind of plastic credits and that we are working with few customers in India and couple of customers in the renewable energy space. So in India there's some rural economies where they are using some kind of coal or wind energy, we call it some kind of water energy. So how we are working with one of our European customers, they are set up some kind of micro grid in India and then accounting the how much they are using the renewable energy and how much carbon footprint they are saving. Then tokenizing in some kind of is a carbon credit token whether it is a deploy in a hyper ledger tokens or some kind of kind of polygon or some kind of other tokens. So they are working and also in the active member of the community of the climate action accounting group. We started this two years before with sidechain, robin, serwood and we started some kind of forming some kind of standards or some kind of what are the different use cases could be built around it. So and then we created one climate carbon accounting and certification working group. We started with normal some kind of concept using the hyper ledger fabric for accounting some carbon footprint and then we extended this to the further kind of using some kind of tokenizing of this different carbon footprint and different difference with the supply chain with the greenhouse emission gases and some already audited credits. And this is live in production. I think we went live in production last month and I think anybody can go and use this open source platform open source code and build around the their climate action accounting kind of projects. Yeah. Hi, good afternoon. Conrad van der Winter, CTO at Circular and we develop we've developed a material traceability platform to track materials throughout the supply chain for big organizations. So from the mine to through manufacturing until the final product has been created in order to create just more visibility for organizations to be able to see and be able to know where materials really come from in the supply chains. It's not just a one time exercise. And then when the supply chain changed, they not aware of it as we getting the data from all the suppliers. All of that is recorded and they aware of all the time where it is coming from. So when we've created this to track material initially, we can also use that same data to then calculate the greenhouse gas emissions. So by combining the actual material that's process, the items that's produced, we can then apply CO2 protocols like IPCC on top of that by using the energy that's the amount of energy that's used by those companies attribute that to those materials in order to help the companies determine the scope one to and also the scope three emissions that's coming through the supply chain. So Conrad as CTO of Circular, I'm sure you get a lot of questions of why blockchain is being used and what are the principles of blockchain technology that help. Can you tell the audience today how you describe blockchain, how you describe your use of hyperledger fabric within the circular platform to a customer to a Volvo to a Jaguar to these large car manufacturers where sometimes the word blockchain might not be the nicest thing that you can say to them. So if you can just explain to us why blockchain, why blockchain in the circular platform is an important element of it and then how do you describe that importance whether you use the word or not to your customers and to the participants in that network. So normally when we work with organizations we sell it as a traceability solution and we're trying to help them determine get transparency and visibility in their supply chains. Sometimes when we talk to a customer after a while they say well you guys should use blockchain or why don't you and actually what's underpinning this is a blockchain is hyperledger fabric underneath but we don't sell it as a blockchain solution and then trying to find where we need to apply it. We're looking for real world problems and trying to solve those problems and hyperledger fabric blockchain component is just a component in there that enables that transparency or that credibility depending on what reporting is needed because we because on our platform because we're sort of an independent third party we can get data from the whole range of suppliers which are supplying materials to four or five or ten different customers but they only want to share whether we only we need to ensure that only the relevant data is shared with the right customer so that nobody gets benefit in like nobody want to expose who all their customers are. So through blockchain technology and security we can implement that and have a single place where we can have the evidence for it but it's at the end of the day it's we're solving a problem that's there already and blockchain is enabling the solution. Yeah so I think I agree with the now I think the customer understand the like why blockchain I think no need to explain then why they need to implement blockchain because I'm working with some customer now they come forward and ask like I want to implement fabric for particular this particular piece in the system and then I understand like tokenization because they want to do some secondary marketplace of the tokens they want to use the public blockchain but in the accounting perspective they are very clear like for example like in India we're discussing with one potential customer in India and in India there is a end of life end of vehicle life policy you need to recycle or kind of script the vehicle and this particular company actually doing some kind of accounting or some kind of how much carbon footprint will save when the particular vehicle will be scrapped so they are very clear in mind they want to use a hyper ledger fabric because they don't want to meet a millions of vehicle need to be scrapped every year and you can't put this data on a some kind of public blockchain with a gas fees or some kind of other factors about the scalability so they are very clear they want to do the this data recording and confront on the on a permission blockchain like fabric and they want to use if even fabric could provide the tokenization kind of they are happy to if they don't want to trade outside either and so I think now customer understand what they want to do and why the why blockchain I think this was the time earlier in the two three years before when it to explain to customer key blockchain will do the trust transparency now I don't understand those things yeah absolutely so you know we we are using a solution called hyper ledger areas in D as are the underpinning technology it does involve a blockchain but I do you know there is a stigma associated with blockchain which I had I try to talk to my colleagues about it and to others in government to let them know that the process efficiencies involved with the use of this technology are really quite incredible like in the use case that we are we've got for demonstration now it's included on the pamphlets that are left out on the chairs the existing process that these companies have to go through in order to report their carbon emissions to the government it involves downloading a word document from a website filling it out sending it to the auditor the auditor it looks it over checks it adds their verification of that it is accurate creates PDF send it back to the company who then has to fill out a web form and they have to do this for it's for this one company that's on this particular use case it's a mine site that has one mine but there's another company that we're we're expanding with the ecosystem all the time and so another company we're dealing with has I think at least 15 mine sites within the province they have to do that web form for every single mine and so the opportunities for making mistakes for errors the amount of staff time that it takes to undertake this work you know it it does function and it you know the it the regulations are fulfilled through this process but the the potential for business efficiency is really quite quite incredible so I think you know when we talk about emerging technologies when regulations are put forward for for example with climate sustainability and reporting we see acceleration of the development of not only the technologies themselves but the use cases as well so Nancy I know the government of British Columbia and Canada in general are really leading the world in regards to regulations on this topic can you tell us a little bit about how what the regulations are currently and how that is helping you move these projects forward as well and then Kamalash if you could do the same in India and I know we have some slides to talk about from a European Union perspective as well yeah so in British Columbia we have very strong climate legislation we have a carbon tax we have a number of programs that the revenue from that carbon tax is reinvested back into projects to reduce emissions for operators and so the the building upon those processes using distributed ledger technology is really what we're trying to do with this with this project we also have in British Columbia another ministry that does a ton of work around identity technology for individuals so we work in close collaboration with that team because the application that we're piloting is for organizations so yeah they were they're really the visionary group within our minister within our government and we are we are building upon that work for and applying it at the organizational level so in India perspective there are some regulations like extended producer responsibility so and is very strict like in India especially suppose if you're not following first of all you can do some plastic and you are not recycling it they even can find a million dollar by ministries and and that's why this all the plastic or some e-waste recycling companies are following and building some kind of trust and transparent system where they can trick and so the government and the brand who are kind of intend to build some kind of traceability platform another I just mentioned about the this end of life vehicle because India is a huge country and the millions of vehicle and millions of vehicle recycled need to be recycled every year and they've come joined and created some kind of framework to kind of intend to recycle this vehicle and then how much carbon footprint it will save this about this two things which are current existing and recently government of India in parliament building some kind of carbon credit export bill where the currently like suppose the water the carbon credit generated in India is maybe available or exported to the Europe or some other countries but now India is building some kind of I think is already approved in the half of the parliament and now after that like when it's passed in the secondary parliament maybe October November this year then what are the carbon credit generated in India it should be used and offset in India only and when this bill is officially announced by government then all the companies or all the kind of it will get huge market for the carbon credit and carbon offset market in India so I'll just briefly show you some details about the German government's battery passport project so and this sort of all fits a little bit in with both other things they talked about about the BC's the government looking into tracking or people having to report certain emissions information as well as the battery life cycle so part of this the goal for the German project is to support the sustainable transition to low carbon mobility and energy storage as well as reduction in raw material extraction and dependency through increased material efficiency lifetime extension residual value determination and recycling so there's a number of different items that this covers that is about the so circular is is one of the technology is the technology partner in this project where different work packages need is researching the amount of looking at the regulations determining the amount of data that's required to be reported upon and determining technical standards for this to be widely adopted and then it creating a demonstrator in order to prove that this can work so I'm just going to skip through these but there's a number of different measures that is part of the battery regulations and sort of it's also looking at the tracking the making looking at the where materials has been resourced from that has been done sustainably and not in conflict areas but then after that resources were used for example in a battery that they can then track the battery life cycle as well and then determine the at the end of life so it's not it doesn't meet the requirements for electric vehicle anymore but that battery could be reused for energy storage the full history of that battery still exists and that is verifiable so that maximum use is achieved through the batteries instead of just recycling it after a single lifetime or a single life yeah so over time over the next few years there's a number of different regulations that's coming in and in increasing the minimum standards of what need to be reported or what need to be part of the batteries that's being produced I feel like I should just stand it'll be easier so and that's great to see these projects actually fitting with timelines like this right because the work that circular has been doing for many years I know they've been part of the hyperledric community since 2017 is really paying off quite a bit as well Nancy you know verification right in the trust in the data is really an important aspect of it I was hoping you can address the question of you know what is a verifiable credential and how are you using verifiable credentials as part of your platform thanks yeah so verified credentials are a they're a digital version of physical identity of physical credentials so such as your driver's license your birth certificate in this case we're using verified credentials as the mechanism for the sustainability reporting and the carbon reporting that producers need to do in British Columbia so with verified credentials there is always an issuer of that credential a holder of the credential and a verifier of the credential and in this use case it gets a bit confusing because the word that the auditors use to check the box for the audited carbon report is also verified so bear with me as I explain this it is definitely one of the issues of trying to map an existing legislative process with a new technology is some of the terminology can get confusing anyways so the issuer in this case is the carbon auditor it's PWC they issue the verified credential from their digital wallet it's the holder of the credential is the mining company or the natural gas company they also have a digital wallet and then the verifier in this case is the the climate action secretariat which is the regulator so the the the blockchain component of this is that the credential the verifier is able to see from the digital credential who issued it when it was issued and that it is still valid valid the information that's contained on the credential is not recorded in the blockchain so that's a really important component for privacy reasons you can see that the transaction has taken place on the blockchain but you cannot access the actual data that's included on the digital credential I can talk about the uh some different thing in what is we did in a hyper ledger carbon accounting project so there we created some kind of a decentralized autonomous organization like currently uh whether we're our gold distance gold standard certified the your carbon credits so because and this centralized authorities so we created some kind of uh dow plate dow kind of uh platform there and instead of uh getting certified the carbon credit via some kind of centralized registry we created this uh some decentralized registry so whoever would like would like to part of this dow platform they could just be member of this thing and they can get some kind of uh dow token credit token and if for example suppose there is a one uh renewable energy project in Maharashtra is maybe running we suppose it's generating maybe suppose suppose thousand metric turn co2 saving so currently possess like someone need to uh submit the project to the where our gold is tender and they will certify like this the actual savings but part of this dow thing uh which is the running running in production and climatics and accounting group so there you can simply what are the already the member of the dow they can out for the particular project like this is a general not and then on the basis of this dow's conclusion voting uh mechanism it automatically issue that carbon credit to the tokens to the particular uh project so this i think is interesting thing in the this project okay so one i've had the pleasure of spending the last three days with Nancy and the conversations that we've been having with other members and other government agencies as well um about using these technologies as part of their projects Nancy i was wondering if you can help the audience understand the role of government in building these technologies and actually you know the government British Columbia is actually contributing to the open source projects right a lot of the contributions are coming from within the government or are also being supported by the government in the ecosystem tell us a little bit about that and the kind of conversations that you've had here at open source summit and the hyper ledger foundation event um around uh yeah around using the technology and how do you how do you get governments involved and at the table building alongside with the private sector um so you may have noticed that i do not have a technical background um i have a policy and strategy background so i'm very new to the whole concept of distributed ledger technology open source software um something that has been really mind blowing for me since i've been at this conference and the hyper ledger conference beforehand was that i was hearing from governments other governments that they are using the software that the bc government has inputted into the open source uh hyper ledger areas and indeed that they that it has begun being of use for them and that they are actually creating their own solutions based on that software um i knew that we had really world class folks working for us but that kind of validation from the united nations from the government of rhod island uh has been very um humbling for me uh it has also made me realize that the open source model is really one that i think governments it just aligns so well with government's objectives around um going moving forward to the public good using this to these technologies in a way that is going to be of most benefit to citizens and uh companies out who are active within the economy of your jurisdiction um and being able to uh you know work together with other governments around the world through the open source um model to develop solutions that are applicable in so many different use cases like we have one here but there's all sorts of uh other use cases for uh that we're working on as well but also for individual identity um i think the possibility is for digital government um and for just making the lives of citizens and uh companies uh better is um it's it's very inspiring it's very cool to be a part of it um sorry just uh yeah i think as part of that that's quite good because the other if a government contributes and other governments can see that and then they can start to contribute as well so and it's all tax pays money and that goes into this so they don't have to reinvent the wheel but there's it's open source but there's a little bit of extracuritability that's given like another governmentizing doors as well so that's really good adoption and a way this is Conrad it's going to ask you you know why open source when you made a decision when circular made a decision on what software to use why why open source and why does it matter um what yeah so we when we started we compared a few different um solutions and um luckily upload fabric was one of those that came out just at the right time um and it's i think for us it's we because it there's cost there's trust there's different components that's borders and other gas fees or other things is in part of a consideration as well and just the amount of support and um availability of some of these technologies just made the open source fabric the easy choice Kamlas you're very active in the hyperelectric community as a leader within the technical steering committee you're also very active in the climate action special interest group that you mentioned before tell the audience a little bit about why it matters for you and for your company and the customers that you work with that participation and contribution to an open source foundation is really beneficial so i think um being a member of any open source community i think is uh add value to your credibility in the in the market or like for example if you if you are a member of hyperelectric foundation and when you talk to the customer can customer get the confidence like okay uh combination his company is part of the hyperelectric foundation and they have a indirect connection and talk talk to the customer and talk to the founder foundation people and i think so only uh customer who are implementing a some solution they need some kind of confidence because when come to the open source only i think now and this is not it's new but earlier people think like open source is free or maybe how much is sustainable is mature or not it will work or not so but now the things are maturing not just the blockchain thing but what are the other open source other Kubernetes we can take an example cloud native foundation so all these are kind of mature products and now companies even even government especially are looking for the open source project they don't want to go with some kind of any license software even even i talk to many customers uh they're generally looking at a hyper ledger fabric or hybrid indies even i know many customers many government initiatives they only look for the hyper ledger based technologies instead of going to maybe some art decoder for example or maybe public blockchains because in terms of maturity or in terms of the now the how the foundation built in the last couple of years we're getting close to the end i thought maybe we can open for some questions from the audience for the next five minutes and we have five minutes left correct um any questions for the audience from the audience mm-hmm sure so um i i will paraphrase and correct me if i don't get it quite right but um i it's the question was around um how heavy of a lift is it of a as a government to undertake a project like this um i would say that it's it's been a real learning curve um the uh the folks the stakeholders who were uh in and wanted to be a part of the pilot from the beginning totally dedicated so excited about it like zero effort to get them involved they were pushing it forward um other stakeholders within government and external to government who are a key parts of that trust triangle that i was talking about the issue or holder and verifier um it for some of them it was more moderate effort you know educating them about what we were doing what we weren't doing i can't tell you how many times i've been asked why are you getting involved in cryptocurrency you're using blockchain so that's the level of understanding for some people they don't realize that there's actually meant multiple different uses of this technology um and then for for some folks it's been a really quite a an extensive lift it's been a bit of a we've had to do a bit of a long play uh for them to realize that um you know they're to see that we are continuing with the work and that there is benefit to it and uh to be able to articulate that to them we really uh something that we did midway through the pilot so after the first year is that we have the technology team we have an entire team now that's for communications change management business analysis policy analysts to understand the legislation um and then and that was we built that into the business case for the second year that's made a huge difference because the technology the quality of the of what we're building remained the same but now we can actually we know how to talk to people about it and that's made a huge difference for us any other questions how about a closing statement right the call the call to action is a very important one when it comes to to climate i think every single person in the world of course is going to be affected um just a last statement around why this is so important um for us to work together um but primarily of why this is a technology opportunity um versus an opportunity a technology weight that we're putting in on the planet um so i think because a lot a lot of this is driven by governments and institutions like they want to optimize their supply chains although they want to see um further away from them and actually because they become responsible it's it's not just one tier and you forget about it but because it's affecting everybody it need to help um they need to find a way to have that trust but also be able to have the visibility throughout so and open source technology is like how pleasure fabric and the security around it can help to implement those things i think a big portion still is the education because a lot of people think blockchain is cryptocurrency or tokens and it's expensive and it takes lots of energy to actually do it and so the education part but we've seen in the last four years that initially there are a lot of questions where now it's much more not it's easy to talk to them about it and talk about the solutions and then yeah so in general i think it's um it helps with that trust and transparency yeah i would say for us it's really been uh diving into a use case and piloting it and learning from it and framing it as a learning experience for government um and on that note you know we're very happy to talk to other governments we're happy to talk to you know all of the levels of government to share our knowledge we really have learned a ton already about how what the benefits are of implementing a technology like this to a particular use case we're happy to share information um yeah i had something else i wanted to say but i can't remember yeah okay so i think social security is the need of today i think everyone understand the climate chain global warming and uh and how blockchain can play an important role because if you are not accounting properly the carbon emission footprint you can't be reaching and targeting your net zero goals of carbon carbon savings so in blockchain i believe like uh after supply chain and finance and services the next domain of the blockchain with the we will be in the climate action accounting it has multiple use cases from sustainable sustainable market sustainable agriculture to greenhouse gas emissions savings or carbon carbon accounting or climate or plastic recycle battery passport and and i think everywhere easy compliance is a bigger thing so i think it's going to be great uh next 10 20 years in the particular this space the blockchain could play very important role you actually remember what i was gonna say yeah so i get asked a lot you know what problem are you trying to solve and um i actually think that the better question is what opportunity are we trying to go for because i think that there are incredible benefits to be realized for citizens and companies uh using this technology and i think that you know you don't a lot of people don't know what the what the issue or how much better it could be for their systems so that's great thank you so much the panelists thank you the attendees if you have any questions i'm sure the panelists will be happy to take additional questions as well and we will go ahead and put the case study and the slides if you're okay with it on the sketch so that people online have access to that as well thank you