Blockchain Carbon Credit
shintartanya @ stock.adobe.com
Carbon credits are certificates that verify greenhouse gas emission mitigation, used as a compensation mechanism that grants balance between new emissions and corresponding mitigation measures taken by industries, companies, businesses, and individuals. When this system is implemented in the blockchain, it allows for tracking, measuring, and storing the record of carbon emissions and then autonomously trading or blocking quota transactions with third parties without intermediaries.
This solution allows citizens, corporations, and countries that cannot afford direct reductions to recompense their emissions by acquiring credits, while rewarding net mitigations producers by allowing them to sell their tokens. These CO2 tokens contain unique verifiable information about each credit’s origin, authenticity, and additional data, including being a benefit or bonus from reforestation or renewable energy. By taking advantage of the integrity and accountability that blockchain provides, the carbon trading market would make their carbon data emissions traceable, permanent, and reliable.
Gender Equality
Challenges
As climate change and its impacts are likely to affect men and women differently, the protocols embedded in this type of blockchain must be sensitive to gender differences in carbon-saving mechanisms to measure in credits more justly.
In terms of the global carbon market, credits are often given to finance high-technology or large scale projects, often overlooking those that genuinely need financing, such as women and marginalized communities who often lack easy or sufficient access to funds to cover adaptation and mitigation actions.
Opportunities
Could ensure that people (especially women) still using carbon-fueled stoves would get the benefits of carbon credits when upgrading to more eco-friendly stoves, bypassing corruption within the credit model.
Carbon emissions are a result of the mass production mindset reproduced by the current patriarchal neoliberal system. A blockchain-based carbon credit is a solution to challenge this system, and more responsibly respond to patriarchal terms.
