Environmental Innovation Initiative Launches with a SCOOP on Carbon Accounting
Every innovation initiative within the Auster Center for Applied Innovation and Research starts the same way: a faculty fellow with a vision, a significant problem worth a decade of hard work, and Tufts expertise capable of taking it on. This summer, the Environmental Innovation Initiative is launching with these characteristics: Dr. Katrina Pugh, a fellow with a vision, will be joined by a Tufts-grounded team of people ready to take on the task of finding a shared methodology for how carbon accounting data is produced, conveyed, and used. This initiative holds one unique factor, however: a solution to the problem is already underway.
What started as a conversation between two former Intel colleagues, Dr. Enrique Castro-Leon and Dr. Katrina Pugh, is now taking shape as something larger. Together, the two former colleagues put together the Scalable Carbon Options with Open Protocols (SCOOP) project which will now sit within the Auster Center's Environmental Innovation Initiative. The goal of this project fits perfectly at the intersection of the Auster Center's priorities in sustainability, artificial intelligence, and financial innovation.
The Problem No One Has Solved
Carbon markets are broken as there is currently no shared methodology for producing, conveying, and using carbon accounting data; this issue is prevalent in three situations. First, many carbon offsets are issued under one-off processes that lack industry-wide credibility. Second, year-end reporting cadences are far too coarse for actual accounting. Third, investors, regulators, and corporate offset buyers cannot reliably compare projects, restate historical figures, or trace a credit back to its physical origin.
This is the missing infrastructure layer of the climate economy. It is also exactly the kind of problem that the Auster Center exists to support: a technical, transdisciplinary, and translational problem with a clear path from research to deployed practice.
The Solution: The application of well-known metrology principles under The SCOOP Carbon Accounting Project
The premise is that carbon accounting deserves the same level of rigor as financial accounting today. This means an International Financial Reporting Standard (IFRS)-grade methodology, with real-time data, event-based measurement tied to the specific processes that are generating emissions or storing carbon. That methodology needs to be robust enough to trade not just on carbon exchanges, but also NYSE. As a result, carbon accounting can be deployed, not just as a footnote in a sustainability report, but as a key part of a company's financial reporting. This is described in Enrique’s and Kate’s 2025 “Robust Carbon Accounting” article published in ADL’s Amplify Magazine.
A Tufts-Grounded Team
The Environmental Innovation Initiative and SCOOP project within it are both led by Dr. Katrina Pugh, a Tufts Gordon Institute faculty member who has built her career at the intersection of sustainability, knowledge management, data, and collaboration. Her background includes prior roles in financial services at JP Morgan and Fidelity, where data management and practical transformation are everyday practice. She holds a PhD in Ecology and Environmental Science from University of Maine, and an MS/MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
The mastermind behind SCOOP is Enrique Castro-Leon, an engineer with decades of IT and standards work, who now chairs the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) P7802 working group on Measurement, Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (MMRV) for climate action projects.
A depth of Tufts connections runs through the rest of the SCOOP team:
Dr. Abani Patra, Professor and Center Director for Data Science of the Tufts Institute for AI, anchors the computational and modeling work, drawing on a career spanning geoscience, biomedical computation, and complex systems.
Kumar Venkat is a veteran of commercial carbon accounting and founder of multiple companies in the space, who brings industry experience and modeling expertise.
Alvaro Segura del Barco is a Senior Security Software Engineer for Akamai, based in Costa Rica.
Jose Zero is a former Intel engineer who brings his expertise in data science and AI to the table.
Parviz Peiravi, a former Intel Chief Technology Officer, recently joined the team as well bringing an expertise in Finance, AI, and environment.
We intend to engage with the Climate Policy Lab at The Fletcher School.
Emerging leaders round out the team with Mariam Moazzam, incoming Columbia master's student and Watson Fellow, and Samin Y. Hasan, master's candidate in the Engineering Management program at Tufts Gordon Institute.
In addition, the team is currently working on establishing an Advisory Board with representatives from Tufts and other organizations throughout the carbon accounting supply chain.
A protocol that permeates so many parts of the carbon and financial supply chain calls for a big tent.
This is the structure around which Auster Center initiatives are built: a fellow with a vision, a Tufts research base, and a coalition of industry and academic collaborators ready to translate science into infrastructure.
What SCOOP is Building
The project breaks into three integrated work streams, all of which have already advanced this summer: the team has drafted the SCOOP data model, built a working prototype measuring a data center’s near real-time carbon emissions, and produced v1 of the SCOOP open-source code requirements.
A metadata model that preserves traceability across participants in a supply chain. SCOOP is designing the data development sequence that enables carbon data to move from its physical origin (a tree, a biochar kiln, a data center, etc.), through verification and aggregation, into use in carbon trading markets, and back again. Thus enabling a system of forward and backward verification, without losing traceability. This is the master data discipline applied to carbon dioxide molecules; multiple implementations are possible under one common architecture using existing IT capabilities.
A prototype illustrating the feasibility of the proposed data transformations across a supply chain. The prototype will illustrate the bidirectional capability of data transformation: from carbon offset origination to FinTech trading markets. The intent of this bidirectional pipeline is to eventually facilitate a frictionless reconciliation market where carbon debtors can pair their liabilities against carbon credit providers in a service-rich environment. The prototype is designed to be portable where principles and the experience gained from building a solution for one market, such as data center operations, can be instantiated to other industries such as insurance, airlines, or manufacturing, at a fraction of the initial cost.
An ecosystem or "landscape". This is both a data profile - a live map - of the carbon-project economy (raters, exchanges, buyers, software developers, etc.), and also a network of collaborators. The model knows where data attestation authority sits at every step, and key players will be invited to contribute.
What runs underneath these three work streams is an AI and audibility layer. As industry representatives extend the core model into their domains, SCOOP captures the reasoning that produces each derivative, providing further evidence of how a new sector-specific model was constructed, as well as a backward path any auditor can follow. The goal is a system that can grow through network effects without ever losing the ability to be verified.
Why SCOOP Belongs at Tufts
The framing and mission of SCOOP fit well within the Auster Center's Environmental Innovation Initiative. This project is open-sourced by design and explicitly trans-disciplinary, drawing on engineering, data science, finance, policy, networks, and field ecology. Additionally, SCOOP is built around the Auster Center's translational logic: prototype, document, standardize, and deploy, with the IEEE standard providing the path from research to industry adoption.
Finally, the entire team is explicit about a commitment the Auster Center shares: bringing the next generation into leadership early. SCOOP is structured to give students like Miriam and Samin meaningful roles from day one - not as research assistants, but as co-builders of an infrastructure they will inherit.
A Concern Worth Designing Around
Dr. Enrique Castro-Leon put it bluntly at the project kickoff: the end goal of SCOOP is not to sell it to five or six global companies for control. The initiative is being designed to actively encourage broad participation from a wide range of skilled service providers, including in regions historically underrepresented in climate infrastructure. How exactly to engineer that outcome is an open research question, and one of the most interesting reasons for a partner to come in early and help shape the work.
Looking Forward to What's Next
As the Environmental Innovation Initiative launches this summer, SCOOP offers a compelling example of what the Auster Center for Applied Innovation and Research is designed to support: ambitious ideas that bring together research, industry expertise, and emerging talent to address complex global challenges. Through this project, the team is building the infrastructure needed for more transparent, trustworthy, and reliable carbon accounting. They hope this foundation can strengthen carbon markets, support better decision-making by nations, organizations, and citizens, and accelerate meaningful environmental collaboration.