Giving Compass' Take:

• Ben Soltoff argues that blockchain technology could close the record-keeping gaps that are a significant barrier to tracking progress on the Paris Agreement. 

• How can funders work to support technology to close gaps for global projects? 

• Learn about blockchain and philanthropy.

The United Nations has been addressing the mismatch between action and recordkeeping through various working groups, but the tech sector has the capacity and know-how to drive these efforts forward.

For instance, I’ve been part of an initiative associated with Yale University that aims to create a comprehensive open-source platform for tracking climate progress. This Open Climate platform would combine data on five systems: the geophysical state of the planet, the climate pledges made by countries and other actors, the actions taken to meet those pledges, the markets used to trade carbon credits and the finance that flows between actors.

A blockchain backbone can bring all of these domains together. Blockchain is a record of information that isn’t stored on any one server but instead across a network. It enables multiple existing data sources to interact with each other, while also integrating new sources. The tech buzzword for this flexible quality is "interoperability." Plus the system is transparent and ownerless, roughly in parallel with the U.N. process.

To better understand what that all means, let’s consider climate pledges. A blockchain platform could integrate country-level pledges made through the U.N. process with the pledges made by cities, states and businesses. It also could assess progress on those pledges based on emissions reductions reported in near-real-time using satellites or internet-of-things (IoT) sensors.

Martin Wainstein, founder and lead researcher at Yale OpenLab, said the recent rise of blockchain has created a perfect confluence of capacity and need.

Read the full article about blockchain for the Paris Agreement by Ben Soltoff at GreenBiz.