Yesterday, blockchain project dClimate announced a partnership with the University of Namibia to measure the country’s environmental and carbon reduction initiatives. Specifically, the climate data organisation will help to quantify the carbon sequestration, carbon emissions, and carbon credits from green hydrogen projects. The blockchain project is backed by American tech billionaire Mark Cuban whose company Radical Investments partnered with dClimate this summer as an investor and strategic advisor.
dClimate aims to use its technology to monetize and quantify Namibia’s green hydrogen output, following a recently announced $9.4 billion project aiming to produce 300,000 tonnes of the fuel. Namibia will be one of the world’s most prolific producers of green hydrogen – using a process where renewable energy electrolyzes water and produces hydrogen gas. Although the green version only accounts for 0.1% of the world’s hydrogen production, this process can generate an environmentally beneficial yet powerful fuel source, which can be used in vehicles, from domestic cars to more intensive mining machinery.
With the help of dClimate’s blockchain-native registry, the expansion of the green hydrogen industry will allow Namibia to avoid a large proportion of fossil fuel-derived emissions, which other countries have relied upon in the past to help their economies develop.
“We are excited to partner with the Republic of Namibia through the University of Namibia to use transparent satellite monitoring to create a scalable, blockchain native verification and registry system for quantifying Namibia’s overall carbon impact,” said Sid Jha, founding partner of dClimate.
Spanish renewables firm Acciona also uses blockchain for green hydrogen, but in that case it’s used to verify the renewable origin of the gas.
In this particular example, dClimate is helping to quantify and verify carbon data. However, the core application of dClimate’s technology is a decentralized climate information ecosystem. This enables independent climate data producers to publish climate data, events and forecasts via a decentralized oracle network run by Chainlink.
It encourages external data providers to upload information, where it is then scored for reliability, to help consumers find verifiable data. The use of blockchain helps the data to remain transparent, accessible, and reliable.
To date, a key goal for dClimate’s data has been for parametric insurance. These types of insurance policies enable environmental data – such as a flood or droughts – to automatically trigger insurance payouts without the lengthy and complicated process of manually submitting a claim. Parametric insurance is often used for low premia crop insurance, such as for Indian tea plantations and an Oxfam and Aon project for Sri Lankan rice farmers. Neither of these projects relate to dClimate.
dClimate has also been used to measure carbon footprints within ESG projects – a similar goal as the Namibian partners, who wish to support their sustainability projects with the decentralized data that dClimate can provide.
Blockchain is widely used for logging carbon footprints, such as a project by Jaguar Land Rover to measure the footprint of leather upholstery. Another example is a World Economic Forum consortium that uses blockchain to track mining emissions.
