STRICTs: A Blockchain-enabled Smart Emission Cap Restrictive and Carbon Permit Trading System
Graphical abstract
Introduction
As the first legally binding global agreement on climate change, the Paris Agreement [1] sets the goal to limit long-term global warming to less than 2 °C, and preferably below 1.5 °C compared to pre-industrial levels. Although by August 2021, fourteen G20 members, covering 61% of global greenhouse gases(GHG) emissions, had announced their net zero targets by 2050, there is still a significant emissions gap of about 23 GtCO2e from a 1.5 °C pathway [2].
To align with the 1.5 °C pathway, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a ‘code red’ for the world to take urgent action to avoid the worst impacts of the escalating climate crisis and provided an updated estimate of the remaining global carbon budget [2]. Meanwhile, as one of the main sources of energy consumption and carbon emissions, the transport sector is responsible for close to a fifth of the energy-related CO2 emissions – driven mainly by consumption of fossil fuel – with road travel accounting for two-thirds of these emissions, mainly from passenger vehicles [3]. Therefore, many industrial experts and scholars put significant efforts on decarbonizing in the transport sector as it has great potential for energy conservation and emission reduction in achieving the climate goals (see Fig. 1).
In the past decades, much efforts has been put in electrification [4], such as the number of electric cars on the world’s roads exceeded 7 million in 2019, and fleets of electric buses and trucks are being procured in more and more cities around the world, however, energy demand and emissions have continued to rise in all modes of road transport (cars, trucks, buses and two-and three-wheelers). The policy-makers have proposed to take several forms of energy efficiency measures in transport including managing travel demand to reduce frequency and distance as well as dependence on high-energy-intensity modes. For instance, in some cities [5] throughout Latin America and Asia, they enact driving restrictive programs by banning vehicles from entering the city center every other day, depending on the last digit of a license plate. However, not all the cities have succeeded in mitigating congestion and/or air pollution because drivers have adapted by shifting trips to unrestricted hours and purchasing additional cars — often old and dirty ones.
Despite that the insufficient motivations for the passengers to cut down the needs of driving their private internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles, rare approaches can be able to reduce road travel efficiently, which makes it quite challenging for decarbonizing in the transport sector. To tackle this problem, in this paper, we propose a blockchain-enabled motor vehicle restrictive approach based on the carbon emissions cap. Our high-level idea is first to set a cap for each private ICE vehicle, if one exceeds the weekly limit on carbon emissions, he will be fined. In addition, one also can get offset permits by not using ICE vehicle to reduce his carbon. Then the permits can be sold to others who want permission to drive more kilometers and emit more carbon.
However, we still encounter two fundamental challenges.
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First, how can we guarantee that the real carbon is being removed to create the offset permit? Since these permits are worth real money, this creates a very dangerous incentive to create false offsets — to cheat. Meanwhile, the carbon footprint of each vehicle is hard to verify.
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Second, how can the market regulators audit whether one is strictly following the carbon emission rules or not, and if not, how to punish them in an efficient way? To manually calculate one’s carbon footprint, the police officer has to find out the exact amount of fossil fuels consumed, and then compute and check the actual carbon emission whether exceeds the weekly limit or not. This procedure is not only error-prone but also cumbersome.
To address the above challenges, we propose to resort to (1) internet of vehicle(IoV) [6], which allows safe and efficient exchange of vehicle-to-vehicle(V2V) information and also between vehicles and infrastructures(V2I) — using vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs); and (2) smart contract technology [7], which is a newly emerging blockchain-based computing paradigm that allows defining and executing self-enforcing contracts on the blockchain. In this paper, we build a smart motor vehicles emission cap restrictive and emission permit trading system (namely STRICTs), which enables automated carbon emission auditing and carbon emission violation punishment without relying on the third party escrow. Such auditing mechanism can mitigate cheating by creating false carbon emissions offsets at the same time.
In addition, STRICTs introduces a novel entity in the system — decentralized enforcer named STRICTs authority in forms of smart contracts including Emission Cap Registration Contract (ECRC), Emission Permit Purchase Contract (EPPC) and Emission Violation Contract (EVC), etc. STRICTs authority is responsible for the main functionalities of the system. The government publishes the emission cap of different kinds of vehicle through a ECRC. An EVC can be then invoked to use the corresponding emission cap to calculate the fines for emission violations. We carefully design the workflow of these contracts and integrate IoV and smart contract not only to guarantee a transparent emission permit trading process but also to provide a method for monitoring or auditing an emission violation incurred by a motor vehicle owner.
In summary, to address these aforementioned problems and challenges in reducing carbon emission in transport sector, this paper therefore builds a carbon emission auditing and trading system. The main importance of this work is to effectively reduce carbon emissions in road transport by restricting carbon permit for each vehicle user based on our presented novel calculation methodology. The main contributions include:
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We first give an in-depth explanation of how carbon cap and trade works in motor vehicle sector and provide the cutting edge methodology for calculating carbon emissions. We also analyze the challenges faced in controlling carbon emissions under motor vehicle sector.
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We propose a smart motor vehicle carbon emission cap restrictive and carbon offsets permit trading system which relies on a dual-chain architecture. And the data chain is used for recording the data collected from the motor vehicle, which guarantees the data reliability so as to ensure the correctness of the carbon emission calculation results in the later stage.
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We introduce a decentralized enforcer named STRICTs authority to responsible for the core functionalities of the system, which is made up of a set of smart contracts including Emission Cap Registration Contract (ECRC), Emission Permit Purchase Contract (EPPC) and Emission Violation Contract (EVC), etc. We carefully design the workflow of these contracts and integrate IoV and smart contract not only to guarantee a transparent emission permit trading process but also to provide a method for monitoring or auditing an emission violation incurred by a motor vehicle owner.
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We implement a prototype of STRICTs and deploy it on Hyperledger Fabric. We also use an open source CO2 Emission by vehicle dataset to conduct a series of experiments and evaluations. And the results demonstrate that STRICTs is technically feasible.
Paper organization. In the rest of the paper, we first survey the related works in Section 2, and provide an introduction of the background of how carbon cap and trade works in transport sector, motivations and the preliminaries in Section 3, and then we present the problem definition and the design goals in Section 4. Next, Section 5 provides a general explanation of the system architecture, the events and the workflow, and the carbon cap determination and carbon emission calculation methodologies in STRICTs. In addition, Section 6 present an in-depth explanation of the main functionalities in STRICTs, including User Registration, Vehicle Data Chain, Emission Policy Registration and Update, Carbon Permit Sell and Purchase and Carbon Emission Audit. Next, we provide an analysis of our proposed system in Section 7. Our experiment is presented in the evaluation Section 8. Finally, we conclude the paper in Section 9.
Section snippets
IoV
The blockchain technology has been adopted in vehicular data management scenarios to address security and privacy concerns and establish trust among the edge nodes. For instance, J. Kang et al. [8] use consortium blockchain to propose a secure and distributed data management system within the vehicular edge computing networks. The advantages of using smart contract are (1) to achieve secure data sharing and storage within the vehicles as well as the vehicular edge computing servers; (2)to
How carbon cap and trade works in transport sector?
Based on The Climate Transparency Report 2021 [2], the transport sector is responsible for close to a fifth of the G20’s energy-related CO2 emissions – driven mainly by consumption of fossil fuel – with road travel accounting for two-thirds of these emissions, mainly from passenger vehicles [3]. Although, many countries have put much efforts on electrification by promoting electric vehicles(EVs), the CO2 emission caused by transport sector is still increasing (emissions increased by about 1.7%
Problem definition and design goals
From a macro perspective, the goal of implementing STRICTs is to reduce the carbon emissions from transport sector by (1) setting carbon emission cap for different types of private vehicle, (2) monitoring the carbon footprint in a reliable way, thus contributing to achieving the carbon peak and neutrality goals in the future. From the regulator’s point of view, they are responsible for enforcing the carbon cap regulations and guaranteeing that all the private vehicle’s carbon emission can be
STRICTs overview
In this section, we discuss the design of STRICTs. We first introduce the architecture. We then describe the workflow and events in STRICTs and the proposed method of carbon determination and calculation used in STRICTs.
STRICTs system design
In this section, we first give an in-depth discussion on the process of collecting and storing vehicle data with trust. Also, we focus on the detailed explanation on the designs of the carbon emission policy registration process and the carbon emission auditing process.
Analysis
In this section, we make the analysis for the ensured design goals.
Data Correctness: The data correctness in STRICTs relies on the security of blockchain. During the data collecting process, the vehicle data generated from IoV sensors will be transmitted through Data Recording Smart Contract(DRSC), and then be recorded in the distributed ledger in the form of drt. Considering the data of a user’s , it will be added into the , and then be encapsulated into drt. Due to the
Implementation and evaluation
We instantiated STRICTs proof of concept prototype through Hyperledger Fabric [44], a well-known consortium blockchain framework that supports smart contract deployment. Fabric is a complex distributed system whose performance varies from different factors including the complexity of the distributed application, transaction size, the network parameters and topology of nodes in the network and etc. In our experiment, we focus on evaluating the viability of STRICTs in the real world settings. We
Conclusion
In this paper, we build a smart motor vehicles emission cap restrictive and emission permit trading system (STRICTs), which enables automated carbon emission auditing and carbon emission violation punishment without relying on third-party escrow. STRICTs collects different types of vehicle data through advanced IoV technologies, including Onboard Diagnostic connectors (OBD). And the collected data then is recorded on a distributed ledger (blockchain) reliably.
Moreover, STRICTs introduces a
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Youshui Lu: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – original draft. Yue Li: Methodology, Data curation, Writing – reviewing and editing. Xiaojun Tang: Visualization, Investigation. Bowei Cai: Software, Writing – reviewing and editing. Hua Wang: Validation, Funding acquisition. Lei Liu: Writing – reviewing and editing. Shaohua Wan: Validation. Keping Yu: Supervision.
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Key Research and Development Program of Shaanxi Province, China No. 2021GXLH-Z-054 and the Key R&D and Transformation Program of Qinghai Province, China No. 2021-GX-112.
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