By Mason Mohon | @mohonofficial

Blockchain technology is being widely adopted across the world, allowing for new and innovative solutions to real-world problems to come to fruition. One of these new real-world problems blockchain will be solving is climate change.

On Tuesday, Viridium Labs Ltd announced that they would be working with IBM to build a carbon credit system on Stellar’s blockchain.

Veridium to Use IBM Blockchain Technology to Create Social and Environmental Impact Tokens. IBM’s engagement with Veridium will mark the first public IBM involvement in a token issuance on public network.#Consensus2018#IBM#BlockchainWeekNYChttps://t.co/LMjittKRcI — Veridium Labs (@VeridiumLabs) May 15, 2018

Carbon credits are used to mitigate the damages caused by corporations by restricting the amount of pollutants they can put into the atmosphere. As greenhouse gas emissions rise and polar ice caps continue to shrink, it is critical that the global community find a solution.

Past solutions have been costly, centralized, and laden with bureaucracy. Veridium is attempting to solve this holdback.

Carbon credits represent the right to emit one tonne of greenhouse gasses, yet the complexity of some credits made their value impossible to determine. In turn, they became untradeable on the open market.

Viridium will be fixing this issue by using Stellar-based IBM blockchain technology. They will establish the value of credits, according to a press release. The Stellar blockchain will be used as the ledger were the credits are accounted, and IBM will be responsible for facilitating the trading.

Veridium Co-Founder and CEO Todd Lemons, this has been one of the primary issues with the carbon credit system. Fixing this will allow the world to move forward with fighting climate change.

For years, we’ve been trying to mitigate environmental impacts at every point in the value chain, however previous solutions still presented significant complexities and costs. Our work with IBM is the first step in dramatically simplifying the accounting and offsetting processes, and therefore ultimately helping reduce costs. Our digital environmental assets are designed to help companies and institutional investors purchase and use carbon credits to mitigate their environmental impacts today, and even hedge their potential carbon liabilities risks in the future.

Organizations that utilize this accreditation system will be purchasing Triple Gold REDD+ credits. These are created by an organization known as InfiniteEARTH and work within the system set forth by the Paris Climate Agreement. Because many countries have joined to the Agreement, Veridium’s system will not have to start from square one for application of the accreditation method.