Enabling Climate Impact Accounting
As part of our practice we monitor other initiatives that overlap with our interests. One of them is the Climate Action & Accounting SIG (Special Interest Group). We’re subbed to their mailing list. The group has a charter which describes the mission, goals, and motivations. Here’s a quote and an illustration:
1.1. Mission & Goals
Foster a collaborative network of climate, DLT [Distributed Ledger Technology], and other emerging technology organizations (i.e. universities, NGOs, government, startups, corporations, multilateral development banks, etc.) that can create a center of gravity around the role of DLT and open source software to address challenges in the global climate action, policy and digital accounting space.
As we’re currently focusing on fundraising for RealClime, we have ‘dev time’ leftover, so we decided to contribute. One of the working groups is developing “An ontology for anthropogenic impact accounting”.
anthropogenic adjective (an·thro·po·gen·ic):
of, relating to, or resulting from the influence of human beings on nature.
The purpose of the ontology is to standardize terminology so that companies and organizations that are involved in impact accounting are all using the same concepts.
ontology noun (on·tol·o·gy):
a set of concepts and categories in a subject area or domain that shows their properties and the relations between them.
This goes far beyond defining words. Currently there are various vocabularies in use (most accounting standards have their own) but they’re mainly definition lists. That leads to conflicts and uncertainties when one starts to try and aggregate impact claims (as will be necessary for the Paris Agreement’s global impact accounting system) across different vocabularies and their implementations. It’s primarily this problem that they’re trying to solve.
Development takes place remotely via a wiki and Zoom meetings, under the auspices of HyperLedger, and ultimately the Linux Foundation. It’s not clear how many people are involved but there’s a core group of three that meet every two weeks. To give an idea of the scale of the project, they’ve been doing this since 2021.
The Premise of the ontology is:
An agent engages in an activity that impacts an environment.
So how does one describe that? Well, it’s a complex undertaking. It requires defining a lot of terms and their relations. Discussions ensue. Sometimes clarifying one word or axiom takes up an entire meeting. It’s a lot of lexical semantics that start to crossover into semiotics.
We asked if there’s anything we could do to help. The answer was that their work progresses in the wiki but the code has fallen behind. We could update and synchronize the .owl file, an XML file structured in Web Ontology Language (a W3C standard).
So we’re doing that. Typically, Kit is doing the communication and Abhi, who has experience with data in OWL format, is synchronizing the definitions.
Timezones are also a factor in the roles we’re playing. Two of the working group guys, Christiaan Pauw and Alex Howard, are based in South Africa while another, Alfonso Govela, is in Mexico. With Abhi in Asia, getting all of us together at the same time would be tricky.
Creating the ontology is a long term endeavor that’ll eventually bear fruit. These guys are laying the groundwork for (climate) impact accounting. In a few years, entities and organizations across the globe will be using the ontology so that everybody is speaking the same language.
The team members are doing critically important foundational work. In the future, they’ll be unsung heroes of climate impact accounting. Please join us in a round of applause! 👏👏👏