Open Source Summit North America 2022

As the world accelerates towards decarbonisation, the need for climate impact accounting at scale becomes more pressing. One of the greatest challenges in this regard is the description, comparison and aggregation of impact claims due to the multitude of existing accounting and reporting standards. The reconciliation and aggregation of these claims, in the interest of climate impact “bookkeeping” at a global scale, requires a common underlying semantic structure – which currently does not exist. The Standards Working Group (Standards WG) of the Hyperledger Climate Action and Accounting Special Interest Group (CA2-SIG) aims to lay out such a semantic structure. Working from the premise that agents engage in activities that impact environments, the WG is actively searching out standards to distill their semantic structures into an ontology that most adequately describes these elements and the relationships between them. The ontology is by design open source, collaborative, dynamic and technology agnostic. The presentation will provide an overview of the WG's work to date, introduce the latest version of the basic ontology, and demonstrate the ontology's application by means of an exemplary use case.