OpenSC

Global food systems drive 34% of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions every year, and 80% of those food emissions happen “at source” (e.g., on the farm, at sea, etc., as opposed to during processing or packaging). At the same time, 70% of global production of key commodities flows through just 500 companies.

Many of these companies have committed to net-zero emissions across their supply chains. But how will they get there—particularly when the biggest opportunities to reduce their carbon footprint lie at source, requiring them to work with literally millions of small producers?

Co-founded with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the world’s leading conservation organization, OpenSC is on a mission to verify, incentivize, and reward action by millions of producers at source for the benefit of people and the planet.

OpenSC’s core offering is technology to verify claims about low-carbon and responsible production in an automated, continuous way, backed by granular and immutable data. To realize the value this creates, OpenSC can also trace products along the supply chains and share their data and story with consumers, business partners, investors, and regulators.

The Opportunity

WWF’s impact venture, OpenSC, has set out to help companies verify specific claims about low-carbon, sustainable, and ethical production in an automated, continuous, and data-backed way.

Present-day systems (e.g., carbon accounting and certification schemes) typically rely entirely on manual audits—spot checks that happen from time to time. Technology can change that and take us further. For many of the most important sustainability and ethical production claims, it is possible to continuously sense relevant data and build systems that verify those claims automatically, continuously, for the whole of production, and often close to real time.

OpenSC has already developed three proven examples of an Automated Claim Verification (ACV):

• Ensuring truly deforestation-free palm oil
• Confirming the right payments to coffee farmers
• Only fishing where it is sustainable to do so

To realize the value that is created by each ACV, OpenSC can then trace products along the supply chain and share their story with consumers, business partners, investors, or regulators.