Key Takeaways:
- The Internet of Emissions Data could enable global-scale decarbonization by facilitating the exchange of Product Carbon Footprint data.
- Open-source contributions are critical for driving innovation in sustainability solutions.
- Organizations can improve emissions data transmission and analysis through networked collaboration.
I started off my career in tech with a lie. The lie was that I told my parents that I was going to continue on with my 3rd attempt at University whilst I completed the programming bootcamp that I had just been accepted into.
In truth, I’d dropped out pretty much as soon as I got into the bootcamp. I had grown disillusioned with the course (I was studying finance) and the way it was taught. I’d just read The Idea Factory, and to say that I was captivated by the magic (pronounced: technology) that was detailed in those pages, is an understatement.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
The Idea Factory is a biographical history book about Bell Labs of New Jersey, the Research & Development institution supported by the absolute crushing dominance of AT&T in the early US telecommunications industry. This book had a tremendous impact on me, and I have considered and thought about the innovations they produced, how and where they worked and the design of the offices they worked from. As a side note, the organisational ergonomics were implemented in such a way as to leverage the architecture of the building itself and produce chance encounters in hallways, members of technical staff were randomly dispersed within the building in such a way as to ensure that members of different professions and skill sets were intermingled. This, along with other initiatives such as mid-afternoon donuts and coffee in central locations, produced an effect of encouraging conversation and then innovation, between highly competent people who would then craft innovative products using the seemingly disparate fields of the innovations participants.
I say all of this gushingly because of the impact it had on my imagination as I joined the industry. I have considered and thought about the relative “coolness” of areas that I’ve worked in all throughout my career, and have sometimes been engaged by what I have worked on, but I’ve also been cognizant of the fact that for the most part, it’s only the very best among “us” (the general engineering cohort) that have the opportunity to work on what is really, truly bleeding edge and transformative, which is why in many ways, I find it quite laughable that I’m working on what I am working on, because I am not one of those engineers.
However, I have been working in and around the PACT Pathfinder ecosystem for a while now, and over the time I’ve spent in this space, I have started to see the edges forming on an idea that I think could produce massively impactful and genuinely engaging technology that can impact people all over the planet, for the better, a trait that I have occasionally lamented with a number of the technology industries larger “success stories”. I make no covers for my distaste of the massive scale social experiment that is social media. I think that the tech industry could do a lot better, and I believe that some of this work can help push us in the right direction.
The Internet of Emissions Data
I first saw the term “The Internet of Emissions Data'' from the PACT Pathfinder ecosystem, and I have now given it considerable mental air time. Along with general thought, I have also put in a significant amount of time on ZeroTwentyFifty’s open source solutions to the Pathfinder Data Exchange Protocol and Pathfinder Framework. I would never have done this work, if I didn’t believe that the Framework and Network could be the foundation for something much, much bigger, which could have far reaching implications when combined with large-scale adoption.
Now, I will be the first to admit that the name itself is probably a bit of a misnomer. It's currently just a JSON API interface. For my non-technical friends, you can think of this like sending letters within your own country: there's a specific structure for writing the address on the envelope, and this can vary by country and language. For the zoomers: letters are very long Facebook messages you send with pen and paper. This interface is built on top of the "real" internet protocols. So, invoking the mystical dark arts of buzzword bingo and prepending the dreaded "Internet of" to the name of the concept is probably a bit much. But then again, that's what the "Internet of Things" is, and we still use that term.
When I started exploring sustainability, I was lucky enough to have a few people be very generous with their time, and I was able to have conversations where I learnt that when a Life Cycle Assessment was completed, and the final report generated, in order for organisations to digest the results and action the information in the report, it would be emailed round in its PDF (or otherwise) format. For a programmer, this results in shock horror, PDF is a notoriously finicky format, prone to rapid changes by a proprietary body that can alter previously functional methods of understanding and working with them.
Ultimately, organisations spend quite a bit of money having a Life Cycle Assessment completed, only to have the output of that assessment exist primarily in a format that is not friendly to transmission and data analysis. If you then extrapolate this issue to the massive catalogue of products that are traded worldwide, you find that as a community, we’re in quite a bind.
What if it wasn’t just kept in that format? What could we do with it? I think that’s why the idea of an “Internet of Emissions Data'' has captivated me so much, it just feels like the start of an entirely new thing, a vast ecosystem of data that can be used throughout processes to create new applications and ways of considering the externalities of product processes, that we’d previously not considered at all.
Much of my thinking on this matter leads on from my opinions on Carbon Accounting, in which I believe that Carbon Accounting is a bonkers idea, with mind altering ramifications when taken to its logical conclusion. Up to this point in human history, we’ve basically just ignored all of the externalities of our current system of commerce, and this statement only concerns Carbon/Emissions, it does not consider all the other impact categories.
I believe we are standing on the precipice of an entirely new accounting system, the creation of financial accounting 2.0, but for emissions. This system will provide the ability for us to reason about new methods of creation and how and why we perform certain processes. We will need to define new methods of how we gather the data, how we alter the old and create new processes, how we track and manage the shift between an outgoing and incoming process, and we will witness the change and shift from heavy emitting processes to lighter, cleaner and more efficient processes.
“For the domestication of dogs, once the wolves began behaving consistently towards humans, a second stage of intentional breeding could begin, selecting for a lack of aggression and other desirable traits. The resu;ts of selecting for non-aggressive animals can be very rapid, as a famous experiment on silver foxes, Vulpes vulpes, in Siberia has shown. Selective breeding was started in 1959. The individual foxes had very little interaction with humans during their lifetime. At seven months old, those foxes that had a muted response to the presence of humans, as measured by the absence of biting and growling, were selected for breeding. They also kept a control group of foxes reared under identical conditions but bred randomly, regardless of their behaviour towards humans. After only a few generations the selectively bred foxes began to approach humans instead of backing away and did not bite when touched. After twenty generations they were as friendly towards humans as dogs, with some of them even wagging their tails. Domestication, as we have seen in wheat and dogs, seems relatively straightforward, and evolution, when we direct it, reasonably fast.”
This change that is coming, will result in a shift in scientific thinking, and technologies and processes that we take for granted will become antiquated. As seen above in the quote from The Human Planet, whilst the overall process of evolution is slow, the process of directed evolution that we have encouraged via the domestication of animals, as an example, is extremely rapid. We can direct our own evolution in emissions, to produce low emitting processes, and secure our future on this planet.
The fossil fuel free rubber hits the low emissions road
A more concrete example:
You are a multinational producer named SCA 1, and you produce a product, named Product A.
You have conducted a Scope 3 Inventory, and have discovered that within your Category 1 Purchased Goods and Services, you have a supplier named SCA 2, that provides you with a component.
This component is one of many that make up Product A.
SCA 2 has the exact same setup, the only difference is that they are not a large multinational company with thousands of employees.
SCA 1 is trying to migrate their spend based inventory to an activity data based inventory, as a result, they make a data request to SCA 2, in order to get them to provide more granular data that can be used to produce more accurate data for their own GHG inventory.
Who foots the bill? It’s not SCA 2 that has the problem, it’s the producer that needs this information. How do you encourage organisations to participate in the network, whilst respecting that in many cases, other than a contractual/monetary obligation to satisfy the needs of a customer, they don’t really have the technical expertise to understand what, how or why they need to provide this data. Creating simple processes to reduce the difficulty for them to onboard their own suppliers, and ensure that we do not sour them on the experience is of fundamental importance, because they may not have a legislative requirement to serve this type of data due to a number of factors, with only one of them being the size of their organisation. Remember that many pieces of recently lauded legislation have size requirements, which rule many SMEs out of much of this legislation in the short term.
Moreso, how do you make the experience pleasant enough for them, so that it is easy when they then have to go and onboard their suppliers, because that’s the way this is all going to work, everyone has a supplier that will have data they need. I think that’s why I’ve become so enamoured by this concept, it just seems to have so many interesting problems and it will both enable and be enabled by the technological innovation created by a concept such as the Internet of Emissions Data.
Possible pathways
I foresee the development of this concept following the trajectory other popular networks have taken. Much like Bitcoin and the Internet, we have a foundational protocol, in this case, the Data Exchange Protocol. As the Pathfinder Network scales and issues are discovered, supporting infrastructure, services and other protocols defined as layers will be developed to remove scaling roadblocks.
In fact, we are already seeing this happen in the PACT Pathfinder ecosystem, with Digital Catapult recently launching a request for application for organisations that believe they can solve 2 of the more pressing issues of the ecosystem:
- Mapping of product ids to internal product registries/catalogues
- Methods to present the PCFs to external stakeholders without compromising safety
Casting a lens to the currently defined technical specification process, issues are being rapidly solved by Working Groups and the standards setting process, for example:
- The transition from the synchronous to asynchronous model of PCF exchange presented and “fixed” by the transition from 2.1.0 to 2.2.0.
- The many various data model changes such as the “making optional” of the CPC code field due to not enough organisations in the space using it or even being aware of UN CPC Codes, and so it has been removed in order to find a more usable data field for indicating the final family of product the item belongs to.
These are fascinating problems, all of these little things I think provide for so much room for movement in the imagination.
- Some of these problems are also hard to solve without a central authority, which makes sense, but when talking with organisations about some of these problems, it is clear that there will be requirements for something akin to automated network discovery.
- How to hand out access to other SCAs without it becoming a bottleneck? Do you just surface it to everyone as an API? How does that work in terms of privacy, security, etc?
How I see it working is that we move in generations, fairly simple, but as the generations go on, we get far more useful and actionable impact from them, but right now we are still attempting to figure out a few issues, some of these include:
- How and what our exchange/transmission protocol even looks like
- How to onboard more organisations to the network
- What forms will the technology take when deployed?
- What does it look like when you deploy or ask a smaller organisation to get into the network?
- How do you continue to increase openness within the ecosystem?
A naturally growing network
To further highlight the “Network” aspect of this concept, I would draw your attention to other ecosystems within the larger space. Development within these ecosystems is coalescing around a common data standard focused on interoperability, the enablement of further data exchange and the creation of more specialised data that solves the issues present within specific industry verticals, such as:
- TFS
- An agglomeration of multiple SCAs within the chemicals space, another industry vertical with very high levels of scope 3 emissions, also massive volumes of individual product lines.
- ILEAP
- This is illustrated by iLeap enabling the development and exchange of a custom network specifically for the exchange of logistics data between different providers.
- Catena-X
- Or Catena-X, enabling the exchange of product carbon footprint data between the different SCAs of the automotive logistics supply chain that has historically high levels of scope 3 inventories due to the sheer number of components and OEMs present in order to get a vehicle from design to road.
Alternative networks
This problem is not just being solved by the PACT Pathfinder ecosystem, and when it comes to attempting to solve the issue of PCF sharing to solve the massive problem of Scope 3, other initiatives like Estanium have formed and specified their own standards and unique ways of creating data exchange networks, surfacing issues that they have also found within their own working groups. What other networks exist?
Where to next?
One of the ways this work captures the imagination is to spend a bit of time thinking about some of the potential applications of this new wave of data access, for example:
- Ways of comparing multiple products or processes, side by side, as to allow for product designers and organisations seeking to reduce the carbon footprint of their products, a way to consult comparisons, migrate to a cleaner process, engage their current suppliers in conversation or tender to the market for a competitor to provide a solution.
- Enabling consumers to also compare finished products, over time, they will develop a sense of the emissions intensity of their favourite products, new marketing tactics will emerge with messaging shifting, examples might include: “Did you know that your favourite product is actually way “dirtier” than the competitor product?”
Given the size and scale of products, the vast global ecosystem of producers, designers, sellers and the overall behemoth that is global commerce, there exists a completely untapped data ecosystem that is only now starting to be correctly defined.
As we dive further and deeper into the data produced by this new IoED we will also uncover pricing differences due to the surcharges that will be incurred when legislation like CBAM and CSDDD come online, some products will get more expensive and others will get cheaper, purely down to the carbon intensity of the product. As this data becomes more available, more jobs will be created to meet the demand of directing development towards lower emissions, and once again, this is all just for carbon/emissions, it doesn't account for any of the other impact categories available.
I believe that where this will likely start to take off is with the CBAM industries, as they will be the first to have a carbon price enforced via the certificates, so they’re going to have to request the data, and from there it will take off.
I’ve had conversations with other engineers that indicate that I am not alone in sometimes feeling a bit embarrassed telling people that I work in technology due to some of our more public failures and outright lame technologies that don't have a great impact on the world, this work can be different though.
By the way, my parents were never really fooled, they knew I’d dropped out.
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