Emission Impossible: privacy-preserving carbon emissions claims

2025-06-19

AI Summary

To address the tension between carbon emission data sharing and privacy preservation in ICT supply chains, this paper proposes the first zk-SNARK-based verifiable carbon emission attestation system. Built upon a blockchain-enabled verifiable computing framework, the system integrates carbon footprint modeling with cryptographic commitment schemes, enabling energy providers, data centers, cloud vendors, and end customers to jointly generate and verify end-to-end carbon emission attestations—without exposing sensitive operational data. Crucially, it introduces the first application of zk-SNARKs to carbon provenance verification, moving beyond traditional paradigms reliant on trusted third parties or fully transparent data disclosure, thereby unifying privacy protection with regulatory compliance. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that end customers can accurately quantify the carbon footprint of their cloud activities; cloud service providers achieve significantly enhanced data authenticity; and ESG reporting exhibits markedly improved credibility and data quality.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Satisfiability Modulo Theories
• Computer Vision: Bias, Fairness & Privacy

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Sustainability and carbon-aware systems for Web, mobile, and WoT
• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web

Abstract

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have a significant climate impact, and data centres account for a large proportion of the carbon emissions from ICT. To achieve sustainability goals, it is important that all parties involved in ICT supply chains can track and share accurate carbon emissions data with their customers, investors, and the authorities. However, businesses have strong incentives to make their numbers look good, whilst less so to publish their accounting methods along with all the input data, due to the risk of revealing sensitive information. It would be uneconomical to use a trusted third party to verify the data for every report for each party in the chain. As a result, carbon emissions reporting in supply chains currently relies on unverified data. This paper proposes a methodology that applies cryptography and zero-knowledge proofs for carbon emissions claims that can be subsequently verified without the knowledge of the private input data. The proposed system is based on a zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive ARguments of Knowledge (zk-SNARK) protocol, which enables verifiable emissions reporting mechanisms across a chain of energy suppliers, cloud data centres, cloud services providers, and customers, without any company needing to disclose commercially sensitive information. This allows customers of cloud services to accurately account for the emissions generated by their activities, improving data quality for their own regulatory reporting. Cloud services providers would also be held accountable for producing accurate carbon emissions data.

Problem

• Track and share accurate ICT carbon emissions data securely
• Verify emissions claims without disclosing sensitive business information
• Enable accountable emissions reporting across supply chain stakeholders

Innovation

• Uses zk-SNARK for verifiable emissions reporting
• Ensures privacy with zero-knowledge proofs
• No disclosure of sensitive commercial data