From January 22nd to 25th of January 2018 the Government of Chile hosted a high-level dialogue on Carbon Pricing in Latin America. The meeting was supported by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), the World Bank Group and the Government of Canada.
The event built on the so-called Cali Declaration from June 2016 when the Pacific Alliance Presidents (Chile, México, Colombia and Peru) made an explicit commitment to promote a green growth strategy to face the challenges of climate change, as well as moving towards a voluntary carbon market for the region – including a common system to monitor, report and verify (MRV) emission reductions. Representatives from all Pacific Alliance countries as well as international MRV experts discussed the current status of various MRV systems as well as challenges within the processes of implementation. The Government of Canada informed the audience about a bilateral program with the Chilean waste sector which supports Chiles NDC implementation with around 7 Mio. USD.
On the technical side of the discussions a specific focus was laid on the MRV related potential of emerging technologies within the Internet of Things (IoT) and Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT). These discussions were deepened in a one-day workshop organised by the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA) following the high-level dialogue on MRV. IETA in corporation with Climate Check from Canada introduced the project “Digital Innovation and Governance for Climate (DIG4Climate)”. DIG4Climate is designed as a four years project supported by the Canadian Government with 1.6 Mio. USD and aims at piloting DLT applications within the MRV sector of the Pacific Alliance countries.
During the IETA workshop the Climate Ledger Initiative (CLI) presented its ongoing research activities with regard to the potential of DLT and the instruments of the Paris Agreement (GHG Inventories, NDC process, GHG Markets and Climate Finance) and introduced two climate-related DLT use cases with a specific link to the Americas:
- Qiru – a project thaims to fight illegal logging in the Amazon by tracking timber along its processing chain. Qiru applies modern communication and blockchain technology within todays forest management processes.
- The second project presented was Gainforest. The Gainforest team developed a peer to peer based financing system, which aims at maintaining large areas of rainforests by connecting forest areas to respective care takers and interested impact investors.
The High-Level Dialogue as well as the technical IETA workshop provided important opportunities for all participants to get prepared for the next generation of MRV systems involving IoT and DLT.
Find here the program and the presentations held during the High-Level Dialogue at the ECLAC premises.
Climate Ledger Initiative’s (CLI) mission is to accelerate the momentum for climate action under the Paris Agreement by systematically strengthening knowledge and opportunities at the intersection of climate change and “blockchain” or distributed ledger technologies. CLI is financially supported by the Governments of Switzerland and Liechtenstein and the EU Innovation Program Climate-KIC. CLI works in close collaboration with the UNFCCC Secretariat.