Organizations are no longer the cold-blooded machines of industry that exist for the sole purpose of increasing profits. Today, organizations are evaluated both on their profits and expenditures, as well as their social and environmental impact. Rightfully so, employees, investors and stakeholders have high expectations of the organizations they chose to align themselves with, especially as resources become more constrained. Modern organizations need to comply with and navigate, Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) criteria.
Helping customers meet ESG expectations is one of the benefits our blockchain technology.
What Customers Need to Know About the Current and Future State of ESG
The Paris Accord, an international, legally binding treaty, sets long term goals to guide countries to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions to reduce the impacts of climate change. As part of this agreement, companies must reach net zero by 2050. Some organizations have even taken a pledge to halve global emissions by 2030.
That said, while the Paris Accord established greenhouse gas emission limits for specific carbons, it did not outline an independent apparatus to monitor the actual emissions of these carbons and organizations are facing the challenge of reporting reliable and accurate data on their actual emissions.
Think of it this way: imagine you are driving a car and need to obey posted speed limits, but your car doesn’t have a speedometer to tell you how fast you’re driving. If you get pulled over and ticketed, you will have no way of knowing your actual speed.
Companies in the oil and gas (O&G), data warehouse, automobile manufacturing, airlines and freight forwarding industries want to provide credible data that holds up to governmental, environmental, and social scrutiny.
It’s Hard to Manage and Report ESG Data That Stands up to Scrutiny
The ability to execute on the numerous aspects of ESG is a challenge that many of our customers face. In fact, they are tangling with a two-headed monster: wrangling and self-reporting massive amounts of data.
Consider this: As companies migrate more data to the cloud for the purposes of reporting, they increase data storage and computing power significantly, which, in turn contributes to a company’s carbon emissions. Oil and gas companies are of course not only responsible for the carbon emissions that stem from their corporate offices, but they must also monitor the emissions from plants and wells, etc. In these cases, data is collected from sensors attached to thousands of devices and is being created at such a rate, that O&G companies require a platform that records data in milliseconds.
To address these challenges, companies are implementing actionable plans that will help them reduce their carbon footprint and accurately and transparently enable them to report to agencies and governing bodies on the various ESG criteria. However, with no independent monitoring apparatus, companies are left to self-reporting.
Self-reporting is often fraught with opportunities for data to be misrepresented or tampered with, even accidentally. Companies are looking to turn over every stone to help and make their lives easier, hence the interest in blockchain as a solution.
The vision of blockchain is to operate as a Decentralized Autonomous Authority (DAO) through the use of Smart Contracts. DAOs allow a system of record to be exposed to the public without the risk of data tampering or fraud, while maintaining trust between the consumers of that system of record. Sounds good, right? But there is a catch.
The inability to record this data in an efficient amount of time creates a bottleneck and problems down the road. Many existing blockchain technologies have difficulties keeping pace as they are verified in 10-15 minutes, at a minimum, almost at a snail’s pace compared to the demands of each business. EB Build is different.
Why Customers Addressing ESG Choose EB Build
EB Build delivers an immutable and transparent blockchain solution that rapidly logs and transfers data on greenhouse gas emissions to regulators. Regulators will be confident they can trust the data because EB Build removes the requirement of self-reporting by delivering data directly from sensors, which cuts out the middleman and eliminates the opportunity for tampering.
EB Build also operates at the speed of business, or technically, in single digit seconds and single digit milliseconds, which is comparable to a high-speed ethernet connection. This allows it to keep pace with the sensors for gas output, among other use cases, reducing any bottleneck with recording data.
EB Build cuts down on a company’s overall computing power in a way migrating to the cloud cannot. In fact, EB Build’s compute power enables companies to reduce the number of servers they utilize by90%. This will reliably reduce a company’s carbon footprint through fewer servers needed to operate.
While reporting on the multitude of factors required for ESG can feel daunting, EB Build is here to help. Be sure to learn more about how EB Build can support your data reporting and security needs.