Climate Accounting Infrastructure: A New Platform with KPMG

KPMG LLP (KPMG), the audit, tax, and advisory firm, recently announced the launch of its Climate Accounting Infrastructure (CAI) capability, built on the Context Labs (CXL) and Spherical|Analytics (S|A) Immutably™ enterprise grade data fabric. This platform demonstrates how blockchain, AI and machine learning can be harnessed for good and have the potential to help solve a large global problem: climate change.

The CXL/S|A Immutably™ enterprise data fabric delivers Asset-Grade-Data in support of CAI’s objective of verifiable emissions. CAI helps organizations more accurately measure, mitigate, report, and offset their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and other climate risks. CAI can incorporate location-specific climate data to assess the business and financial impacts of physical and transition risks related to climate change.

Asset Grade Data acts as a foundational component to CAI, and has a high degree of pedigree, provenance, and veracity. Immutably™ tests and re-tests the data throughout its lifecycle. For example, the sensor on a building can provide contextual data all the way to the secure cloud storage, which feeds signal generation for operators, risk/pricing analysts and investors. That resulting signal can be trusted by each party because of the secure, Asset Grade Data it is built on. 

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions come from a variety of sources to comprise a comprehensive carbon footprint. Increasingly, a growing collection of organizations must meet a number of emerging regulations across the chain of carbon creation. These organizations are now challenged to understand their emissions and commit to operational changes that will have both now- and longer-term climate and financial impact. 

GHG Climate Accounting continues to be an area of focus for the C-suite, who are charged with reducing GHG emissions, and accurately reporting on it via SASB (The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board) and emerging TCFDs (Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures).

This is essentially a way for countries and companies to describe their climate impact(s), and report on them in a trustworthy and reliable manner.

“As investors broaden their focus beyond financial factors to include ESG practices, organizations are increasing efforts to reducing carbon footprints, alongside transparent disclosure of progress. Trusted reporting capabilities, such as those enabled by Climate Accounting Infrastructure, will be critical to meet stakeholder expectations and to comply with emerging regulations,” said Arun Ghosh, KPMG’s U.S. Blockchain leader.

Dan Harple, CEO and founder of CXL/S|A commented, “Context Labs is positioning our machine learning/AI technology stack into a range of vertical segments, as described by MIT’s Michael Cusumano in, 'The Business of Platforms Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation and Power.' The segment in this case is the need for Big Four Accounting firms to address the growing pressure to respond to climate change and provide an industrial strength solution. Adding our ML-generated Asset Grade Data (AGD) is rapidly becoming a checklist item for global firms reporting on GHG emissions.”

Rating agencies, lenders, investors, host communities, and other stakeholders also increasingly demand transparency into an organization’s carbon footprint from its supply chain to its physical locations and assets.

Chris Rezendes, Chief Business Officer for CXL and subsidiary Spherical|Analytics, stated, “We are thrilled to be collaborating with KPMG. Climate resilient operations are no longer ‘nice to have’, philanthropic endeavors. Existing and emerging regulatory regimes persist to create compliance requirements for emissions/carbon accounting. However, what is emerging now are explicit demands from buyers and investors to have carbon accounted for in the products they buy and the investments they make. CAI, in concert with CXL, can enable organizations to drive and prove their progress on carbon and related climate accounting.”

CXL and S|A remain committed to enabling owners and operators to better monitor, mitigate, and avoid greenhouse gas emissions with our technology. One of the trailhead applications in our current collection of served markets is decarbonization in oil and gas operations. Just last month, we launched the Climate Action Engine with Rocky Mountain Institute, beginning our work in Texas. Previously, we collaborated with the Environmental Defense Fund in building the Environmental Data Initiative in monitoring the states of Pennsylvania and New Mexico. By working with KPMG, we’re looking beyond just GHG emissions from energy extraction operations to building emissions and other urban GHG sources. 

One of the first applications of CAI will be in real estate and critical infrastructure. In the press release announcing CAI, KPMG named two other organizations offering measurement, analytics, and verifiability capabilities that will support CAI:

Prescriptive Data is a next-generation ‘building OS’ partners offering one of the most accurate digital twins of building energy and carbon performance available. 

Allinfra is a comprehensive market-maker in climate-attribute-differentiated securities, focused on real assets, with a strong emphasis on critical infrastructure financing. 

Both companies will be contributing technology and resources to the CAI. 

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Climate Week Webinar and the Climate Action Engine

This has been an exciting week for us at Spherical|Analytics. Following our recent launch of the Climate Action Engine with our strategic partners at Rocky Mountain Institute, our own Chris Rezendes was fortunate enough to participate in a NYC Climate Week Webinar entitled, Climate Intelligence for the Oil and Gas Industry. 

The webinar, moderated by Deborah Gordon of the Watson Institute at Brown University and hosted by RMI, featured a strong line-up of industry experts:

• Chathurika Gamage – Rocky Mountain Institute; Manager, Industry and Heavy Transport

• Felicity Underhill – Origin Energy; General Manager for Future Fuels

• Tony Cottone – Oxy Low Carbon Ventures; Senior Director for Strategy and Finance

• Scobie Mackay – Macquarie; Managing Director for Commodities and Global Markets

• Chris Rezendes – Spherical|Analytics; Chief Business Officer

RMI’s Taku Ide, Principal for Industry and Heavy Transport, fielded audience Q&A during the event. 

Chris got the conversation started by defining for the audience the concept of Asset Grade Data, how it matters to monitoring methane emissions, and how S|A provides it through the Immutably platform. 

“It’s about pedigree. It’s about provenance. It’s about veracity,” Chris described. “The decisions that we need to make today… are critical decisions that have more to do with productivity and profitability and as much to do with climate resilience, community resilience, and some other really important decisions that folks have to make to rebuild systems in more resilient modalities.”

Chris went on to state that AGD enables, “the asset owners and operators to disclose more data with lower risk. It enables their stakeholders and the scientific or regulatory or host or risk and finance communities to have their transparency goals met with less risk. It enables every party to take more responsibility, but not necessarily assume more liability. It’s about a collaborative environment where trust is the currency we enable… We can accelerate and scale these kinds of investment decisions and persist the new kinds of models that the folks at RMI, through the Climate Action Engine, are espousing.” 

The panelists navigated through a number of topics to include how operators like Origin Energy and Oxy track and quantify their emissions today, the power of trusted data to driven actionable change, and the value of differentiated commodities like carbon-neutral or -offset oil and gas. Several key insights emerged from the webinar: 

• All decisions must be made with the 1.5 degree future in mind

• Trusted data is the key to enabling stakeholders to make those decisions

• Decarbonization opportunities exist in the entire value, not just upstream oil and gas operations

• The importance of accurately communicating those findings to regulators and policymakers

• The need for a standards-based approach to comprehensive decarbonization, supported by organizations like Rocky Mountain Institute

As new sensing technology becomes available, various new data streams and inputs will further illuminate the ground truth of emissions mitigation. Every year, new methane and greenhouse gas detecting satellites launch into the atmosphere while advanced Internet of Things (IoT) and industrial sensors are deployed into these operating environments. These new data streams will add to the already noisy world of data that exists presently. 

The key to unlocking the insights this data affords will be through their synthesis in a platform like the Climate Action Engine. The industry as a whole has a role to play in the efforts towards decarbonization. Operators require trusted data to make operational changes and standards with which to assess their performance. Consumers demand better information about the origin of their product. Regulators need greater transparency to influence good, science-based policy. Financiers must know the data is trusted and, of increasing importance, climate resilience.  

Underpinning all of that is the technology to bring it all together into a single common operating picture, enabling all of those outcomes. The Climate Action Engine from S|A and RMI intends to be that platform for global methane emissions. 

The Climate Action Engine

Spherical|Analytics (S|A), a Context Labs (CXL) company, proudly announced the launch of the Climate Action Engine (CAE) today, representing the first output of our strategic partnership with Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI). The CAE is a data and analytics platform built on the CXL enterprise-grade Data Fabric, Immutably™, supported by RMI’s ecosystem and insights. The CAE models and visualizes methane emissions from the oil and gas industry in West Texas’s Permian Basin with plans to expand across all geographies, globally.

Evidencing the true extent of GHG emissions starts with data. The challenge lies in accessing the right data and ensuring it can be trusted. The sheer volume of unrefined data can be daunting, especially when processing decades worth of asset production or incidents from the nation’s most productive oil and gas basin. 

That’s where the CXL Data Fabric comes in, a platform built with all-source ingestion, cryptographic proofing services, distributed ledger technology, and machine learning / artificial intelligence-enabled analytics. The CAE ingests inputs from a large number of sources to include: satellites, aerial vehicles, public and private monitoring stations, compliance reporting, and other publicly available inputs and reports. Data sources like these are what CXL defines as “Ground Truth”: data derived from as close to the source as possible. By ingesting primarily “Ground Truth” data, the CAE can ensure the provenance and veracity of that data from the sensor into the model and visualizations. 

Each of these data feeds was ingested, pre-processed, and secured to the highest pedigree direct from the source. That level of attestation and trust elevates the data to become something S|A calls “Asset Grade Data” (AGD). AGD is just that: data transformed into an asset-itself and beyond reproach. This AGD, in turn, feeds Asset Grade Analytics (AGA). The insights generated by the CAE have all gone through this rigorous transformation in order to ensure the highest level of pedigree, provenance, and trust. 

The CAE will also enable the emerging ecosystem of climate platforms and apps to interoperate with it by providing API strategies that support open source efforts, as well as other commercial efforts, to co-exist and accelerate the reduction in methane emissions. That openness represents a core part of the S|A-RMI joint mission. 

The only way to ensure a decarbonized future is through partnerships that support actionable insights empowered by trust: both trusted data and trusted partners. This platform represents the perfect synthesis of the best of both organizations in our shared goal of achieving that more sustainable future. RMI’s deep industry connections, experience, and insight bring together the diverse ecosystem of industry operators and creates partnerships rooted in the trust they provide. S|A drives that trust further through a technology stack that elevates its data and insights to the highest possible standard. 

The CAE is just the first of many outputs of the S|A-RMI strategic partnership. We are proud and honored to work with such a prestigious organization and thrilled to be sharing this launch together. Please visit RMI’s CAE site by clicking here, and their announcement as well. 

If you are interested in learning more about the Climate Action Engine, Rocky Mountain Institute, or Spherical | Analytics, join us for a Zoom webinar on September 22nd during NYC Climate Week. Panelists from S|A and RMI will join industry experts and leaders in discussing the power of trusted data to drive real change. Please RSVP here and we look forward to seeing you there!

The Economist Group Report- A sustainable ocean economy in 2030: Opportunities and challenges

On World Oceans Day 2020, Spherical | Analytics (a Context Labs company) was featured in “A Sustainable Ocean Economy in 2030: Opportunities and Challenges” as part of The Economist Group’s World Ocean Initiative.

CEO and Founder, Dan Harple, discussed our deployment of the Immutably™ for Maritime platform and its implementation: The Marine Databank. Part of Chapter 3, “Welcome to the Blue Data Revolution,” Dan highlights the numerous challenges with aggregating and synthesizing massive amounts of data. “It’s about how you integrate increasingly exploding amounts of data across disparate locations and make sense of it,” Dan stated.

The Marine Databank, powered by Immutably™, was developed in collaboration with the New Bedford Port Authority and the UMass Dartmouth School of Marine Science and Technology to drive actionable intelligence for the fishing fleet, academic research, and other related members of the community. By ingesting, securing, and analyzing public and private data, the Marine Databank provides actionable intelligence for industry stakeholders to better target fish biomass, reduce operating expense, and conduct more sustainable operations.

The Economist Group’s newest report highlights challenges facing key sectors in the ocean economy including seafood, shipping, tourism and renewable energy. The nine-chapter report covers a myriad of solutions to protect our oceans’ health while continuing to enjoy the bountiful economic activity it supports.

We are honored to be featured in this important report and we remind everyone to support ocean sustainability not just on World Oceans Day, but every day.

To read and download the Economist Group report:

To learn more about Immutably™ for Maritime:

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