Guest Talk with Cory Levinson | Who Writes the Rules of Climate Protocols?

TalkCory LevinsonMay 13, 2023

Cory Levinson traces the history of carbon markets from the Kyoto Protocol through the Paris Agreement's still-unoperationalized Article 6.4, contrasting the fragmented voluntary carbon market (Verra, Gold Standard, ACR) with compliance regimes, and recounts how Toucan's CO2 (CLA) tokenization protocol exploited Verra's retirement mechanism until Verra froze bridging in 2022. He then frames climate protocols into three layers—financial, scientific (MRV/methodologies), and semantic (ontologies/RDF)—arguing that semantic protocols using relational data models like RDF and the semantic web could let disparate scientific methodologies build on each other rather than scaling in isolation.

Topics

article-64-compliance-vs-voluntary-carbon-markets carbon-credit-tokenization-retirementimmobilization governance guest-talks mrv-monitoring-reporting-verification permanence-additionality-and-leakage-risk-in-offsets protocols research semantic-protocols-and-rdfontologies-for-ecological-data technology

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