The IOTA Foundation has joined forces with Dell, ClimateCHECK, and BioE to fight climate change. Through collaboration, the companies intend to develop solutions to combat greenwashing using real-time carbon footprint data.
Guaranteeing Trusted Data.
The IOTA Foundation’s mission is to support the research and development of new distributed ledger technologies, including the IOTA Tangle. The partnership with high-tech behemoth Dell is part of ‘Project Alvarium’, which seeks to solve trust issues relating to data. First conceptualized in 2019 by Dell, the plan aims to accelerate the advancement of Data Confidence Fabric technology.
“The importance of data transparency is integral to how organizations in every industry move forward. Data confidence is needed to manage data at scale, creating systems of trust in this data, so users at all levels understand the terms of use. Project Alvarium will create this transparency. The more companies that integrate it into their processes and systems, the closer we’ll come to a future without data ambiguity,” explained Steve Todd, Fellow at Dell Technologies.
As modern industries often rely on automated decision-making systems, and data loads increase, it becomes difficult to assess the trustworthiness of recorded information. But the creators of ‘Project Alvarium’ claim to have created a measurable way to evaluate the reliability of data in response to this issue.
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The system logs different steps in the journey of each data point as it travels from an edge, or IoT device sensor, to a router, to an edge server, and to the cloud. Each interaction is given a trust rating score according to industry-specific requirements. Importantly, these scores are logged on the IOTA Tangle to ensure integrity and prevent any potential tampering.
A Way to Avoid Greenwashing
According to Mathew Yarger, Head of Smart Mobility at the IOTA Foundation, the workforces in place are insufficient to verify what incentivizes carbon exchanges and credit processes. As a result, many companies misreport their emissions, often fabricating a minimized impact.
“We’ve seen it in energy production facilities, where they’ll say, “Oh, we’ve reduced our emissions output by this much.” But once you can actually go through an audit that process, you figure out those numbers are about 50% off.
This happens pretty commonly in the industry, and it’s been a hard problem to address. But by having a high level of data transparency, you can start to have a compliance-as-a-service mechanism to ensure that what’s being reported is actually factual,” stated Yarger.
The four companies have developed an integrated digital measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) tool to address the issue. The digital MRV can pick up data from sensors and manual inputs, processing it through Dell PowerEdge servers to ultimately deliver near-real time insights into the carbon footprints of BioE’s sustainable energy and composting facility. The opportunity, made possible through innovative technology, can bring about a new level of transparency.
“Transparency and trust in data are paramount for addressing the global issues of climate change and transitioning to climate action. We’re now able to track and verify data around climate change and how we’re actively trying to address it at a level that’s never been achieved before,” Yarger underlined.
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IOTA believes that the technology could be applied to a vast array of real-world scenarios, where trust certification is needed for all involved actors. For instance, the use of this same technology during the pandemic could have helped to measure the trustworthiness of data involved in the vaccine rollouts on a massive scale. Everything from the provision of vaccines, to how many people in which regions were receiving them could have been managed much more effectively using the technology.
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