Carbon Footprint Management Using Blockchain

There is a broad consensus that greenhouse gas emissions management requires coordinated efforts and collaboration in all sectors and at all levels of an organization or within the value chain. However, potential conflicts of interest and lack of trust between stakeholders make this collaboration extremely challenging. Blockchain has opened the door for a series of innovative applications that can propose an efficient carbon footprint traceability and management solution. Blockchain is a distributed secure database, called a ledger, among different parties, used to hold and verify tamper-proof records or transactions without the need to trust any participant of this process except the mechanism. In the race to net zero, the need for an advanced information and communication technology has become vital to global climate change management with increased digitalization, decarbonization, security, and decentralization challenges. Blockchain is proposed as an integrated platform for various applications, such as carbon traceability, carbon trading, certification, and value chain management. This work presents an overview of blockchain technology and its working principles. It describes blockchain's novelty and innovation to the industry and climate action. Also, the paper investigates blockchain's potential for carbon footprint traceability and management. It explores the latest use cases and the current challenges. It concludes that enabling innovation for climate action requires digging further into evolving disruptive technologies such as blockchain.