carbon credit
Engineering Carbon Credits Towards A Responsible FinTech Era: The Practices, Implications, and Future
Zeng, Qingwen, Xu, Hanlin, Xu, Nanjun, Salim, Flora, Gao, Junbin, Chen, Huaming
Carbon emissions significantly contribute to climate change, and carbon credits have emerged as a key tool for mitigating environmental damage and helping organizations manage their carbon footprint. Despite their growing importance across sectors, fully leveraging carbon credits remains challenging. This study explores engineering practices and fintech solutions to enhance carbon emission management. We first review the negative impacts of carbon emission non-disclosure, revealing its adverse effects on financial stability and market value. Organizations are encouraged to actively manage emissions and disclose relevant data to mitigate risks. Next, we analyze factors influencing carbon prices and review advanced prediction algorithms that optimize carbon credit purchasing strategies, reducing costs and improving efficiency. Additionally, we examine corporate carbon emission prediction models, which offer accurate performance assessments and aid in planning future carbon credit needs. By integrating carbon price and emission predictions, we propose research directions, including corporate carbon management cost forecasting. This study provides a foundation for future quantitative research on the financial and market impacts of carbon management practices and is the first systematic review focusing on computing solutions and engineering practices for carbon credits.
Carbon Market Simulation with Adaptive Mechanism Design
Wang, Han, Li, Wenhao, Zha, Hongyuan, Wang, Baoxiang
A carbon market is a market-based tool that incentivizes economic agents to align individual profits with the global utility, i.e., reducing carbon emissions to tackle climate change. Cap and trade stands as a critical principle based on allocating and trading carbon allowances (carbon emission credit), enabling economic agents to follow planned emissions and penalizing excess emissions. A central authority is responsible for introducing and allocating those allowances in cap and trade. However, the complexity of carbon market dynamics makes accurate simulation intractable, which in turn hinders the design of effective allocation strategies. To address this, we propose an adaptive mechanism design framework, simulating the market using hierarchical, model-free multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Government agents allocate carbon credits, while enterprises engage in economic activities and carbon trading. This framework illustrates agents' behavior comprehensively. Numerical results show MARL enables government agents to balance productivity, equality, and carbon emissions. Our project is available at https://github.com/xwanghan/Carbon-Simulator.
The Download: carbon credits for EV chargers, and the real risks of AI
California-based automaker Rivian markets its high-end electric trucks to climate-conscious consumers hoping to do right by the planet. Now, the firm has applied to earn carbon credits for the chargers that power its pickups and SUVs, including those installed in its customers' homes, MIT Technology Review can reveal. The move raises new questions about who deserves the credit: the person who buys a $75,000 electric pickup or an $800 charger, or the company that manufactures and sells those products? And if those benefits can be quantified, should they be bought by individuals or businesses hoping to cancel out their own ongoing pollution? It's time to talk about the real AI risks Unsurprisingly, AI was the topic on everyone's lips at the world's biggest digital rights conference last week.
Widespread Increases in Future Wildfire Risk to Global Forest Carbon Offset Projects Revealed by Explainable AI
Ballard, Tristan, Cooper, Matthew, Lowrie, Chris, Erinjippurath, Gopal
Carbon offset programs are critical in the fight against climate change. One emerging threat to the long-term stability and viability of forest carbon offset projects is wildfires, which can release large amounts of carbon and limit the efficacy of associated offsetting credits. However, analysis of wildfire risk to forest carbon projects is challenging because existing models for forecasting long-term fire risk are limited in predictive accuracy. Therefore, we propose an explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) model trained on 7 million global satellite wildfire observations. Validation results suggest substantial potential for high resolution, enhanced accuracy projections of global wildfire risk, and the model outperforms the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research's leading fire model. Applied to a collection of 190 global forest carbon projects, we find that fire exposure is projected to increase 55% [37-76%] by 2080 under a mid-range scenario (SSP2-4.5). Our results indicate the large wildfire carbon project damages seen in the past decade are likely to become more frequent as forests become hotter and drier. In response, we hope the model can support wildfire managers, policymakers, and carbon market analysts to preemptively quantify and mitigate long-term permanence risks to forest carbon projects.
BMW Machine Learning Weekly -- Week 15 – Towards Data Science
News about Machine Learning (ML), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and related research areas. IBM believes that blockchains can help reduce carbon emissions by turning carbon credits into crypto-tokens. The world moving towards a "token-driven economy" is supposedly part of a scheme to create a massive marketplace of novel digital assets. IBM hopes to build software platforms for trading these tokens. And one of the first things it plans to help digitize has a bonus feature: it benefits the environment.