Vagabond Sustainability Suite
Life Cycle Inventory, Assessment & Management, incl. DAO Governance
Facing increasing regulatory and stakeholder demands, organisations need insights at their fingertips to innovate and embed sustainability into their value chains with a focus on providing sustainability intelligence, break down silos and provide data-led insights, so businesses can not only record and report sustainability metrics, but — even more importantly — act accordingly on a problem to solution basis, cradle-to-cradle, in cross industry value creations and impacts.
Vagabond’s Sustainability Suite: Life Cycle Inventory (LCI), Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) & Accountability, and Life Cycle Management (LCM) modules, enable precise identification and assessment of environmental impacts in result of product or industrial activity by quantifying all material flows and assessing how they interact with the natural environment allowing concrete and actionable solution crafting through the scientific measurement of environmental impacts.
Life cycle thinking has emerged as a useful tool in sustainability to consider the total impacts of an activity, product, or service throughout its value chain, cradle-to-gate or ideally, cradle-to-cradle.
A value chain is the connected activities that an organisation undertakes in providing a product or service, with each interconnected activity adding value.
Cradle-to-cradle can be defined as the design and production of products in such a way that at the end of their life, they can be truly reintroduced, imitating nature’s cycle with everything either recycled or returned to the earth, in closed-loop, continually circulating. One could argue that this would be the equivalent to true sustainability — all products become sustainable as nothing becomes waste which cannot be reused.
Vagabond Life Cycle Modules
The Vagabond platform offers a set of various sustainability derived life cycle modules applicable to any product, service or production process at any stage in the life cycle, together with decentralised governance (DAO), allowing democratic decision making in regards to industry processes, carbon estimate data, and footprints. These modules, when used individually or together, allow full evaluation of all environmental, social and economic negative impacts and benefits in decision-making processes towards more sustainable products and processes throughout their life cycle.
Below we dive into what each module represents and the key role they play in attaining a holistic scientific approach on the application of sustainable measures throughout a given life cycle assessment.
Life Cycle Inventory (LCI)
An LCI provides detailed insights into calculation and analysis results; identifying main drivers throughout the life cycle, by process, flow or impact category and location. These are objective measurements, tracking different inputs (e.g., energy, water, resources, land) and outputs (e.g., emissions, wastes, products) that occur throughout the life cycle of an industrial process, technology, or commodity.
When a complete LCI analysis is accomplished, it allows an assessor to map flows of energy, resources, and materials in and out of a system. The LCI data is interpreted later in the study, during the life cycle assessment (LCA), to represent actual impacts on the environment or human health.
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) & Accountability
Life Cycle Assessment involves taking a holistic perspective to understand the true short-term and long-term economical, social, and environmental impacts of a business activity, fostering better collaboration across value chains.
LCA allows the measurement and assessment in all aspects of a company’s carbon and environmental impact, including product, organisation and value chain footprint, under direct control (Scope 1 and 2) as well as from indirect exterior emissions (Scope 3).
Scope-3 greenhouse gas emissions, which includes direct emissions (Scope 1) from owned or controlled sources, indirect emissions (Scope 2) from the generation of electricity, heating/cooling and steam consumed by the reporting company, and all other indirect exterior emissions (Scope 3) that occur in a company’s supply & value chains.
While outlining the environmental impacts of a product or service, an LCA also serves to identify hotspots. These are points in the life cycle that have significant negative impact on the environment or society. Most often, resolving hotspots becomes the keystone of the sustainability plan based on a complete LCA.
Life Cycle Management (LCM)
LCM is the systematic progress of organising, analysing, and managing sustainability impacts throughout the entire life cycle of a product, process, or activity; from raw material extraction through materials processing, manufacture, distribution, use, repair and maintenance, and disposal or recycling. Helps identify waste, reduce costs, boost sales and enhance a company’s brand awareness through sustainable carbon reduction strategies with environmental and social impacts in mind.
DAO — Decentralised Governance
DAOs — Decentralised Autonomous Organisations — in theory, do not represent a single application but rather an organisation that does not have a typical physical structure. The DAO runs entirely autonomously, by people (as users), with each individual given equal voting rights for proposals, procedures, and metrics.
The Vagabond Sustainability & Life Cycle DAO is seen to complement international standards, principals and frameworks by allowing democratic decision making in a decentralised manner by both code and community, decreasing the chances of data manipulation and fragmentation as a result.
Different proposals can be submitted through on-chain governance and be put up for community voting, the list is including but not limited to:
- Standardisation of metrics
- Standardisation of systemic processes
- LCI data standards, estimates, and ranges
- Platform proposals, changes, and governance
Product Life Cycle and Sustainability Reporting
CSRD
The Council and the European Parliament have recently reached a provisional political agreement on the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). That’s good news for us and the world!
This directive is a radical extension of the existing Non-Financial Reporting Directive (NFRD) and will play a key role in achieving the targets set out by the European Green Deal and the Sustainable Finance Agenda.
As of the reporting year 2023, large companies will need to publicly disclose information on the way they operate and manage social and environmental risks and make businesses more accountable by obliging them to report their impact on people and the planet. The main purpose of the CSRD is to increase the availability of sustainability information and to improve transparency for all stakeholders and part of a larger strategy by the European Union to encourage the flow of finance towards sustainable investments.
Why Vagabond’s Life Cycle and Sustainability reports help
The non-financial information that companies are currently incentivised to report is largely insufficient for investors and other stakeholders. Reported data can also be hard to compare as they reside on centralised infrastructure with permissioned access rights, prone to failure and maloperation.
While guidelines for ESG and sustainability data disclosure exist today (e.g. NFRD requirements), they are not of mandatory use. This has led to a wide variety of reporting methods between companies, making it hard to compare.
Vagabond Sustainability Suite helps businesses and organisations identify, track and collect required sustainability data, from inside and outside, ensuring active reputational and financial risk management. Stakeholders, including regulators and investors, by using Vagabond’s sustainability reporting tools are able to foster efficient and accurate risk management reports, ESG performance & sustainability reports, and guarantee regulatory compliance in all life cycle assessments, saving time and cost whilst driving transparency, traceability, and accountability within organisations, between organisations, and their stakeholders.
ISO 14040 Compliance
Vagabond’s Sustainability suite generates ISO 14040 compliant reports, certified for financial and sustainability reporting, allowing access to reliable, transparent and comparable data on-chain by means of an immutable public ledger.
Where does blockchain technology fit in?
The biggest benefit of blockchain for value chains is that even small interest groups have the opportunity to securely exchange information. Trust and efficiency in value chains together with proper on-chain Life Cycle Assessment tools, DAO governance, and compliant reporting allow businesses to seamlessly transition into a carbon-neutral ecosystem to protect and improve operational processes and data through a transparent, green, and secure infrastructure.
Investors and civil society increasingly want to know about the impact that companies have on the environment, economy, and on the society as a whole to factor in important decision making processes.
Blockchain technology makes it possible for financial and sustainability reporting on an equal footing, allowing permissionless access to reliable, transparent and comparable data, on-chain and on demand, through an immutable public ledger accessible to all.
Paramount among the benefits of Distributed Ledger Technology (Blockchain) is its ability to reduce the costs of maintaining, securing, and verifying databases on a global scale.
Question is, with so many different types of blockchain technology infrastructures available today, it is easy to become overwhelmed and confused on the selection of the proper ideal candidate for the task. How would one choose infrastructure for a Sustainability Life Cycle Suite (LCI, LCA, LCM), that can scale, provide reliable pre-defined transparent data processes while being stable, cost effective, and carbon neutral?
After a thorough assessment of all available blockchain options on the public market, one can quickly conclude that no such blockchain is available that truly fulfills all the necessities and industry standards required for the inclusion of LCA tools on-chain without going through loops and hoops, patch ups and smart contract workarounds.
So why not create one from scratch and model the technology to suite the need at hand?
VagaChain, 3rd Generation — L1 Blockchain
Welcome to VagaChain ($VAGA). Combining a high degree of transparency, efficiency, and trust with a sustainable solution is what VagaChain offers with predefined modules, processes, and reporting with regulatory compliance to current and future industry standards. What used to be a cumbersome and daunting task to most, now transformed into a seamless process with enterprise-grade LCA and ESG reporting modules built on-chain, alongside intuitive dApps easily adopted by customers and partners through a simple point-and-click or drag-and-drop experience.
“The biggest benefit of blockchain for value chains is that even small interest groups have the opportunity to securely exchange information. Combining a high degree of transparency and trust with a sustainable solution is what VagaChain offers.”
Navid Kiani Larijani — Managing Partner Vagabond Solutions
“There is a growing expectation towards businesses to play a vital role in addressing sustainability challenges. The only viable and sustainable solution is to have ESG / Green Bonds / Green Assets but also ESG and Sustainability ratings as well as Sustainability as such audited by everyone on a transparent ledger instead of centralised entities.”
Dr. Thomas Riegler — Partner — Silverbear Capital & CEO Vagabond Solutions
To be continued…
