Building an End-to-End Digital Ecosystem for Carbon Markets-background

Building an End-to-End Digital Ecosystem for Carbon Markets

Climate Warehouse
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Climate Warehouse

The Climate Warehouse program prototypes, tests, and develops digital infrastructure to foster greater transparency, trust, and integrity in the carbon markets. Successfully prototyped and tested elements of the digital infrastructure will be operationalized to build the market infrastructure. Examples include the metadata platform designed to connect and aggregate registry information—now operationalized outside the World Bank as the Climate Action Data Trust (CAD Trust)—as well as digital MRV systems, national carbon registries, tokenization instruments, and a one-stop resource platform to strengthen knowledge-sharing and capacity-building.

End-to-End Digital Ecosystem for Carbon Markets
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Metadata Layer - Climate Action Data Trust (CAD Trust)

The World Bank’s Climate Warehouse program develops tools, technologies, and market infrastructure to promote transparency, comparability, and trust in carbon markets. A core focus of the program has been the design and testing of a “public metadata layer” to connect disparate carbon credit registries, supported by common data standards, APIs, and multi-country pilots. This work aims to reduce risks such as double counting and to enable smoother interoperability across systems.

 

 

The Climate Action Data Trust (CAD Trust) is the operational outcome of this effort. Established jointly by the World Bank, the Government of Singapore, and IETA, CAD Trust is a decentralized, open-source platform that implements the Climate Warehouse architecture. It provides a neutral, global infrastructure where participating registries can publish standardized information on carbon credits. By doing so, CAD Trust enhances transparency, facilitates cross-registry tracking, and supports the integrity of international carbon markets, including those operating under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement and the voluntary carbon market. The World Bank serves on CAD Trust’s Advisory Board to provide technical support and guidance as needed.

National Carbon Registries

Prototype: National Core Carbon Registry

 

The National Core Carbon Registry is a prototype platform designed to help countries develop the skills, workflows, and governance models needed to operate a national-level registry for issuing digital carbon assets.

This tool can be used for hands-on training and capacity building, allowing registry administrators, policymakers, and technical teams to:

  • Practice manual and automated data uploads for projects and issued units.
  • Understand how to align registry data with the Climate Action Data Trust.
  • Explore the governance, transparency, and interoperability features of blockchain-based systems.

 

Code:

 

Core Registry Specific Components:

 

Tokenization components used by Core Registry:

 

Digital Measurement, Reporting & Verification (d-MRV)

A digital MRV (dMRV) can be defined as a MRV system that includes using digital technologies and processes to automate the collection of data, the reporting of GHG emissions, and the generation of mitigation outcomes to improve the functioning of future carbon markets and ease the burden of satisfying reporting requirements under the Paris Agreement.  

 

The World Bank aims to support countries to pilot digital MRV systems to demonstrate proof-of-concept, test interlinks of digital MRV systems with registries, and foster an enabling environment for the implementation of digital MRV. A Digital MRV improves the speed and accuracy of reporting, lowers reporting and verification costs, and increases scalability and security of MRV systems. 

 

Principles:

  • A dMRV has a two-layer system (physical and digital) that automatically collects, stores, analyses and display relevant data in the context of emission mitigation projects. It allows users to obtain, in a faster and cheaper way, reliable data aiming at creating emission reduction credits.  
  • dMRV can help mitigation projects report data from remote locations with minimal human intervention.  
  • AI and algorithms provide data control and quality checks and identify missing or wrong data for an enhanced accuracy when reporting.  
  • Data storage ensures access to historic of projects, raw data, transformed data and easy and quick access to verification body at any stage of the value chain. 

 

Publications: