A framework for carbon accounting for sustainable supply chains using Blockchain, Internet of Things, and Artificial Intelligence

Carbon accounting plays a pivotal role in promoting sustainability by monitoring carbon emissions throughout supply chains and encouraging eco-friendly practices, thus helping to combat climate change. It can help organizations identify major carbon emission sources, enabling them to focus carbon emissions reduction efforts on the carbon hotspots. This can help achieve some of the UN sustainable development goals, such as sustainable cities, clean energy, and climate action. However, current systems lack transparency, traceability, trust, and decision-making to effectively perform carbon accounting and make suitable recommendations. Emerging technologies like Blockchain can enable carbon emission data transparency, traceability, and security, while the IoT enables precise data monitoring. Artificial intelligence (AI) enables carbon emission prediction and integrates carbon accounting systems to inform sustainable management of supply chains. Integrating these technologies as a single framework creates a secure and reliable system for performing carbon accounting and assisting in decision-making about measures to reduce carbon emissions in the supply chain. In this paper, we present a conceptual framework for using these technologies for carbon accounting and discuss how it can facilitate achieving some of the sustainable development goals. We discuss the implications, challenges, and barriers of this framework, followed by future research directions.