In her monthly Expert Accept cavalcade, Selva Ozelli, an international tax attorney and CPA, covers the intersection between emerging technologies and sustainability, and provides the latest developments around taxes, AML/CFT regulations and legal issues affecting crypto and blockchain.

The 2022 United nations Climate change Conference (COP26), where I exhibited my fine art, took place in Glasgow, Scotland and concluded with the adoption of the Glasgow Climate Pact, bringing nearly 200 countries closer to keeping global temperature rising by 2100 nether i.5 degrees Celsius.

The conference remained more focused on emission reductions than on developed countries' provisions of support to developing countries, as outlined in UN-Energy's summary of the Ministerial Thematic Forums, which highlighted key recommendations and milestones toward the accomplishment of Sustainable Development Goal vii and net-aught emissions. Central elements of the global roadmap include:

  • Close the free energy admission gap: Provide electricity access for the globe's 760 million people who lack information technology. Ensure clean-energy cooking solutions for the two.half dozen billion people who rely on harmful fuels.
  • Apace transition to make clean free energy: Abandon all coal plants in the pipeline, and reduce coal power capacity by 50% by 2030. Apace scale up energy transition solutions to reach viii,000 gigawatts of renewable energy by 2030 by increasing the almanac charge per unit of free energy efficiency from 0.viii% to iii.0%.
  • Leave no one behind: Integrate equity and equality in energy-sector policy by planning and financing, creating green energy jobs, and mainstreaming free energy-sector policies and strategies into ones that ensure just free energy transitions.
  • Mobilize acceptable and well-directed finance: Triple make clean-energy investment globally past 2030 to advance access to finance. Stage out inefficient subsidies for fossil fuels to support market-based transitions to make clean free energy. Create enabling policy and regulatory frameworks to leverage private-sector investment in clean energy.
  • Harness innovation, engineering science and data: Aggrandize the supply of energy innovation that addresses cardinal gaps and increases need for clean, sustainable energy technologies and innovation through market-oriented policies, harmonized international standards and carbon pricing mechanisms.

The COP26 conference made history for being the first climate superlative to explicitly include a "phasedown of coal" in its decision, and it laid out new rules for carbon marketplace mechanisms, unremarkably referred to as Commodity 6. A contempo research paper estimated that putting a global carbon market place in place would save the world around $300 billion annually by 2030.

Related: The pandemic year ends with a tokenized carbon cap-and-trade solution

Commodity half-dozen of the Paris Agreement, which covers international cooperation — including carbon markets — established new rules for trading carbon credits representing a metric ton of carbon that has been reduced or removed from the atmosphere. The new rules create an accounting system that is intended to prevent the double-counting of emissions reductions and is made upwards of ii parts: a centralized system open to the public and private sectors, and a split bilateral system that volition permit countries to trade credits that they can utilise to aid meet their decarbonization targets.

Related: Climate Concatenation Coalition advocates for the cosmos of a dark-green economy at COP26

Joseph Pallant, climate innovation director at Ecotrust Canada and founder and executive managing director of Blockchain for Climate Foundation, explained to me:

"Emissions reductions outcomes are the nearly of import, and soon to exist the most valuable, assets of the globe."

He continued: "The BITMO Platform, built on Ethereum, enables cross-edge collaboration on emissions reductions, distributing the benefits of make clean energy, natural climate solutions and better infrastructure to all corners of the globe."

The BITMO Platform is a project of Blockchain for Climate Foundation, which created it to advance Article 6 of the Paris Agreement and use blockchain technology to bring forward a more effective, efficient global carbon market. It allows for the issuance and exchange of "blockchain internationally transferred mitigation outcomes" (BITMOs) on the Ethereum blockchain as ERC-1155 nonfungible tokens (NFTs). Each token represents one metric ton of CO2, and the relevant carbon credit data is embedded in the NFT.

Related: How will blockchain engineering science assistance fight climate change? Experts answer

Article 6 intends to connect worldwide opportunities for emissions reductions to the needed uppercase and demand. For a global carbon market to reflect existent emissions reductions, the bookkeeping infrastructure needs to ensure integrity, cooperation and avoid double-counting emissions reductions. The BITMO Platform acts as a secure tape for issuance, transfer and retirement of each land'due south internationally transferred mitigation outcomes that can be integrated or reconciled with national carbon registries and time to come Un Framework Convention on Climatic change requirements. BITMOs help accomplish global climate goals by making any relevant data easily visible, available to the public and settled immediately when exchanged, avoiding the double-counting of emissions reductions.

Carbon tax

Another ane of the major points of discussion amongst world leaders at the COP26 conference in Glasgow included implementing a carbon tax, which shifts the liability for the consequences of climate change to the polluters responsible, according to the Earth Bank. Currently, there are 69 countries with carbon taxes, ranging from $i to $139 per metric ton.

Related: The demand to report carbon emissions amid the coronavirus pandemic

The assistants of United States President Joe Biden has outlined $555 billion in spending to confront climate change as a part of the Build Back Better Act, which includes a proposed methane fee designed to incentivize oil and gas companies to reduce their methane emissions.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author'southward alone and do not necessarily reflect or stand for the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Selva Ozelli, Esq., CPA, is an international tax chaser and certified public accountant who frequently writes about tax, legal and bookkeeping problems for Tax Notes, Bloomberg BNA, other publications and the OECD.