Case
International organisation - Environmental applications for Kyoto protocol
Environment
Global warming is affecting all of us. To remedy this, many concerned countries joined an international treaty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and agreed on a plan to reduce the emission of green house gases under the name Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto Protocol imposes a yearly reduction target on the amount of greenhouse gases that industrial nations are allowed to emit, an obligation implemented through a “cap and trade” trading principle. Within Europe, the protocol is extended and refined by the European Commission to the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS). Both the United Nations (UNFCCC) and the European Commission (DG Environment) needed a powerful IT system to monitor the trading of carbon units and to verify the coherence of the European and UN member states to their obligations of emission reduction.
Solution
In a first phase Trasys designed and built the IT systems that allowed the European Commission to record and verify all exchanges of carbon units within the European Union: the Community Independent Transaction Log (CITL) and the Community Registry system (CR). Although the system was highly complex and required very tight timelines, it went online as planned and with success. Thanks to results delivered, the United Nations entrusted Trasys for the design and construction of the new International Transaction Log (ITL) system which connects the systems of all participating countries in the Kyoto protocol worldwide. On the functional side, the systems contain:
a “B2B” part which connects the central system with the systems in each country. This central system acts as a communication bus and uses modern SOA communication solutions like Web Services and SOAP messages.
a secure web site to control the system and a public web site to disseminate the information available to the public.
The architectural side of these systems is based on the J2EE platform and related design patterns and technologies. The systems are designed for high availability, high security and high scalability with clustered environments, fail-over, load balancing and disaster recovery sites. In addition, Trasys also provides helpdesk support for 40 countries across 13 time-zones. With over 45.000 hours of experience in this very specific environmental and regulatory domain, Trasys has become a world leader in this matter.
Benefits
The CITL, CR and ITL systems, all in production, allow the European Commission, the United Nations and the Member States as well to monitor the trading of Kyoto units and their Kyoto obligations. For instance, and according to the CITL information from national registries, the total amount of verified emissions from EU ETS installations in the EU-25 zone (excluding Malta) was 2.050 billion tonnes of CO2 in 2007.