Carbon Accounting as an Auditable Information State: A State-, Evidence- and Response-Oriented Architecture for Reproducible Carbon Information

This working paper specifies an architecture that treats carbon accounting information as an auditable information state: a version-bound representation for a defined period, boundary and purpose that remains reconstructable after later corrections. Building on carbon-ledger, provenance and internal-control research, it connects calculation entries with bound factor versions and recipes, closed reporting states, typed evidence assessments, versioned qualitative assertions and recipient-specific response packages. Three design propositions and eight invariants specify historical reconstruction, preserved communication and impact review, including changes in evidence or permitted use without numerical change. A synthetic seven-entry example shows a supplier factor correction that raises a customer-selected product-related result from 450 to 490 kg CO2e per batch while a bank-selected Scope 1/2 sum remains at 1,450 kg CO2e; counterexamples cover evidence withdrawal, boundary change, policy-scope failure and uncertain transmission. An edition-bound mapping to the EU VSME standard separates unit conversion from disclosure coverage. No implementation or empirical evaluation is reported; a falsifiable comparison against a configured versioned-repository baseline is proposed as the next test.