This is a glossary of relevant terms that relate to Filecoin and specifically the work of the Filecoin Green team!

• Storage Provider (SP)
  • SPs are the primary agents responsible for storing data and files on the network and are the heart of Filecoin. Storage Providers offer up storage space for clients to store their data and in return, they earn FIL-the native cryptocurrency of Filecoin. SPs earn FIL for storing data and for verifying the storage of that data across time.
  • For more information on how being a storage provider works visit here!
• Renewable Energy Certificate (REC)
  • Renewable Energy Certificates are a way for purchasers (i.e. storage providers, corporations) to track and certify that a specific amount of renewable energy that is generated, as well as the external benefits of that energy, are owned by the purchaser of that REC. A REC is created for every megawatt-hour (MWh) of renewable electricity that is generated and sold to the wholesale market.
• Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (MRV)
  • MRV relates to the monitoring, reporting, and verification of GHG emissions and emission reductions.
  • Measurement is needed in order to determine emission trends and where to focus reduction efforts, as well as for tracking mitigation efforts. Reporting and verification are critical for ensuring transparency, credibility, accountability, and overall trust that when an organization says they are reducing emissions, they actually are.
  • Here is a great graphic from the World Resources Institute that highlights some of the 3 types of MRV activities.
  • See also: dMRV (Digital-Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification)
• United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
  • The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is the entity that is tasked with supporting unified efforts toward fighting climate change and the global reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
• Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs)
  • NDCs are long-term goals/commitments by countries to reduce national emissions and adapt to climate change. According to the Paris Agreement (Article 4, paragraph 2) countries are required to prepare, communicate and maintain successive nationally determined contributions (NDCs) that it intends to achieve.
• Greenhouse Gases (GHG)
  • Greenhouse gases are gases that trap heat in the atmosphere and are necessary for making our planet inhabitable (without them, Earth would be really, really cold). However, as a result of anthropogenic activities (i.e. the use of fossil fuels, the agricultural industry, deforestation, and more), the concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere have increased at an unprecedented rate and are leading to rapid increases in temperatures across the globe.
• CO2
  • Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the primary greenhouse gas emitted through human activities; the most prominent activity being the burning of fossil fuels for transportation and energy. These particular activities can both 1) add more CO2 directly to the atmosphere and 2) impact how carbon sinks (i.e. forests, soil) remove and store soil (Read more here).
• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
  • The IPCC is a function of the United Nations that is tasked with assessing and furthering scientific knowledge related to climate change, with a particular emphasis on the dissemination of information for policymakers.
  • “The IPCC prepares comprehensive Assessment Reports about the state of scientific, technical and socio-economic knowledge on climate change, its impacts and future risks, and options for reducing the rate at which climate change is taking place” (IPCC)
  • You can read the most recent working group report here.
• Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHGP)
  • The Greenhouse Gas Protocol helps set standards, guidance, and training for organizations and governments to evaluate and manage GHG emissions.
• Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG, in investing)
  • Environmental Social Governance (ESG) is a framework that helps organizations create strategy and long-term value based on various factors in environmental impacts, social/community interactions, and how a corporation governs itself. ESG includes things such as responses to climate change, management practices of natural resources, health and safety policies within a company, supply chain management, tax strategy, and board structure.
  • ESG investing is a form of investing that considers the impacts of ESG factors and frequently leads to higher returns and reduced risks.
• Sector
  • “The sector is the default unit of storage that miners put in the network (currently 32GBs or 64GBs). A sector is a contiguous array of bytes that a storage miner puts together, seals, and performs Proofs of Spacetime on. Storage miners store data on behalf of the Filecoin network in fixed-size sectors.
  • Sectors can contain data from multiple deals and multiple clients. Sectors are also split in “Regular Sectors”, i.e., those that contain deals and “Committed Capacity” (CC), i.e., the sectors/storage that have been made available to the system, but for which a deal has not been agreed yet.”
• Sealing (in Filecoin)
  • “Sealing is a cryptographic operation that transforms a sector packed with deals into a certified replica associated with: i) a particular miner’s cryptographic identity, ii) the sector’s own identity.
  • Sealing is one of the fundamental building blocks of the Filecoin protocol. It is a computation-intensive process performed over a sector that results in a unique representation of the sector as it is produced by a specific miner. The properties of this new representation are essential to the Proof-of-Replication and the Proof-of-Spacetime procedures.”
• Storage Deal
  • “Two participants in the Filecoin network can enter into a deal in which one party contracts the services of the other for a given price agreed between the two. The Filecoin specification currently details storage deals (in which one party agrees to store data for the other for a specified length of time) and retrieval deals (in which one party agrees to transmit specified data to the other).”
• Power Distribution Unit (PDU)
  • A PDU is a unit that provides power to hardware in a data center, and may also be used to measure energy consumption.
• [Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE)](https://www.data4group.com/en/datacenter-dictionary/what-is-pue/#:~:text=PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) is,just the IT equipment alone.)
  • Power Usage Effectiveness is a way of measuring and evaluating the energy use performance of a data center. This is calculated by taking the ratio of energy used as a whole compared to the energy used just by IT equipment.
• Committed Capacity
  • “If a storage miner doesn’t find any available deal proposals appealing, they can alternatively make a capacity commitment, filling a sector with arbitrary data, rather than with client data. Maintaining this sector allows the storage miner to provably demonstrate that they are reserving space on behalf of the network. Also referred to as Committed Capacity (CC).”
• Content Identifier (CID)
  • “CID is short for Content Identifier, a self describing content address used throughout the IPFS ecosystem. CIDs are used in Filecoin to identify files submitted to the decentralized storage network. For more detailed information, see the github documentation for it.”
• [Peer ID](https://docs.libp2p.io/concepts/peer-id/#:~:text=A Peer Identity (often written,and its public cryptographic key.)
  • “A Peer Identity (often written PeerId) is a unique reference to a specific peer within the overall peer-to-peer network. As well as serving as a unique identifier for each peer, a PeerId is a verifiable link between a peer and its public cryptographic key.”
• Pinning (on IPFS)
  • Pinning is the process of making a CID available on IPFS for a longer duration of time