What sets WeCarbon apart is that it makes data trust both its core principle and its key tool, providing one-stop carbon neutrality management solutions that meet companies' real needs for economic value and social impact.
Author | Jia Boxin
Editor | Su Jianxun
In the two years since China set out its sustainability goals, the green and low-carbon transformation has become an essential path to high-quality development for every industry. Yet the process has also exposed a number of problems that urgently need solving.
Because carbon emitters are numerous and varied and touch every aspect of production and daily life, carbon data is hard to account for and hard to attribute, and falsified emissions data is all too common. The problem of trust in carbon data severely limits the ability of institutions of all kinds to assess the sustainability transition, and has in practice become a major obstacle to China's sustainability transition.
WeCarbon, which 36Kr met recently, is a technology company providing one-stop carbon neutrality management solutions. Its WeCarbon Cloud carbon neutrality management platform offers one-stop services for carbon data, carbon verification, carbon trading, carbon finance, climate risk and ESG management, driving the digital low-carbon transformation of industries.
Trust in data collection, data analysis, data transmission and data verification are understood to be the four key problems that must be solved to build a data trust system, and they are a major focus for the industry.
In data collection, WeCarbon Cloud uses automation to reduce the operational risks of offline meter reading and manual reporting, and collects companies' emissions and other data through satellite remote sensing, drones, the industrial Internet of Things and other technologies, ensuring as far as possible that the data is authentic and reliable.
In data analysis and calculation, WeCarbon Cloud uses standardised automated processes that unify the carbon calculation process and statistical scope, reducing the influence of human factors found in traditional accounting.
In data transmission, WeCarbon Cloud applies the cryptographic principle of "zero-knowledge proofs" together with blockchain technology, so that third parties can verify how credible the data results are without accessing the raw data.
At the data verification stage, the entire data pipeline is given a data trust score. Each time a user adopts an automated data collection method, increases data frequency, adds indicators for cross-validating data or puts a batch of data on-chain, they earn a higher score in WeCarbon Cloud's carbon data trust rating system (Trustability for Carbon Emission Data, TCED).
Eric Ma, Founder and Executive President of WeCarbon, told 36Kr that WeCarbon has two main business lines, technology and consulting. WeCarbon Cloud was developed by the company's wholly owned subsidiary, WeCarbon Zhigu, and mainly provides carbon data trust services for four types of scenarios.
Scenario one is digital low-carbon industrial parks. Serving parks from planning, design and low-carbon construction through to the realisation of economic value, WeCarbon Cloud provides the calculated results of parks' verified emissions data to financial institutions, using trusted data to speed up green loan approvals and help companies close carbon trades.
The second is forestry carbon sinks. Drones and remote sensing collect geographic and topographic data such as land area and tree height, which the AI algorithms of the WeCarbon Cloud platform process to calculate the carbon stock of forest biomass across the whole project area, enabling automated, large-scale verification and management of forestry carbon sinks.
The third is integrated energy management. Connected to industrial internet control modules, the WeCarbon Cloud platform can automatically carry out emission-reduction recommendations, saving energy costs for industrial parks and buildings.
The fourth is headquarters management and disclosure management for listed companies, central state-owned enterprises and other state-owned enterprises. With the corporate risk and measurement modules on the WeCarbon Cloud platform, large companies can easily manage the emissions of their subsidiary production facilities, and are supported in improving their ESG ratings and valuations.
At present, WeCarbon is implementing all four service scenarios as demonstration projects before rolling them out to the market. In carbon trading, WeCarbon plans to connect with exchanges to help governments and companies sell, pledge and otherwise trade CCER carbon assets on partner exchanges.
Eric Ma told 36Kr that, amid the wave of carbon neutrality, many companies analyse and process data through private deployments and similar arrangements. The company's main revenue model today is private deployment for large and medium-sized clients, charging technical service fees. Once the business matures, the model the company hopes to explore in depth is helping green finance and carbon trading institutions obtain accurate carbon data through the platform and close deals with the relevant parties, charging transaction advisory and platform usage fees.
On "greenwashing", an issue of great concern in ESG investing, Eric Ma said the company would explore cooperation with government agencies, financial institutions, companies and others to build a carbon data trust rating system covering data sources and data processing, and planned to launch and implement it as a group standard to reduce greenwashing. "WeCarbon Cloud is an open platform. We welcome companies to upload carbon data through automated collection, which keeps the data traceable, trackable and tamper-proof and also strengthens their own credibility. Only when data sources are genuine, high-quality and comprehensive can governments, companies and investors pick out projects with real long-term value and screen out greenwashing projects."
In terms of business, WeCarbon overlaps to some extent with Carbonstop and Baotan. Eric Ma said that Carbonstop provides companies and institutions with carbon management consulting, carbon training, a carbon management platform, carbon neutrality and other products and services, with a fairly comprehensive emission factor database, while Baotan set up a carbon asset management fund early on and has certain advantages in financial services. What sets WeCarbon apart is that it makes data trust both its core principle and its key tool, providing one-stop carbon neutrality management solutions that meet companies' real needs for economic value and social impact, which is quite distinctive in the market.
WeCarbon's core team members come from well-known institutions such as Columbia University, Peking University and Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business. The company also has a capital-markets professional services team with more than 15 years of experience and over 500 completed cases, providing clients with services in ESG investment and financing and carbon neutrality transition strategy.
Eric Ma told 36Kr that WeCarbon Cloud would officially go live at the end of November. With the platform's launch, the company will also use its wholly owned subsidiary WeCarbon Zhigu as the financing entity and start planning an angel round of several million to tens of millions of yuan.
This article is an original work by Jia Boxin. For reprints or content cooperation, please see the reprint guidelines; unauthorised reprints will be pursued.
Images in this article: Visual China Group
Read the original article: With "Data Trust" as Its Entry Point, WeCarbon Offers One-Stop Carbon Neutrality Management Solutions | Early-Stage Projects