Introducing the Guardian – A Requirements-Based Tokenization service That Makes Creating & Discovering ESG Assets Easy

Wes Geisenberger, VP of Sustainability & ESG at The HBAR Foundation writes in a blog post, “Hedera & the HBAR Foundation are proud to announce the first open source reference implementation of the IWA Voluntary Ecological Markets (“VEM”) Standards. This framework includes a Policy Engine for creating digital monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) with an auditable and discoverable link to ESG assets such as carbon emissions, carbon offsets, renewable energy certificates (REC’s), or conservation tokens following the Species Threat Abatement and Restoration (STAR) metric.

The outcome of this implementation is that any project building on Hedera will be able to quickly develop an ESG asset that enables a policy driven approach for defining projects like a carbon removal following a scientific methodology and the required auditable data for specific attributes such as the vintage year, geography, additionality, durability, and leakage. These carbon removals will be discoverable, as tokens on Hedera, and auditable to the sub-metric tonne through links to the data used to generate the asset following HIP 19. Ecosystem participants will be able to look up the roles and actors attesting to the MRV data tied to specific metric tonnes. This means when someone wants to prove a specific action, actors can see when devices used to measure were certified, audited, and what scientific protocol is being used for measurement, who implemented it, when the framework was audited, etc. The benefit of this is by defining each complex workflow across actors, data, and their relationship what once was siloed and required complex verification steps can now be audited on Hedera following HIP 19 and HIP 28 and discovered by asset type, down to the specific emission.”