AUTONOMOUS ESG COMPLIANCE ENGINES: AI-BLOCKCHAIN INTEGRATION FOR REAL-TIME CARBON ACCOUNTING, SCOPE 3 EMISSIONS VERIFICATION, AND REGULATORY REPORTING IN INTELLIGENT ENTERPRISES

Abstract

Corporate sustainability reporting has entered a mandatory compliance era. The European Union's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, the US Securities and Exchange Commission's climate disclosure rule, and California's Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act collectively require large organizations to report verified Scope 1, 2, and 3 greenhouse gas emissions with third-party assurance, creating a data governance challenge that manual reporting processes and disconnected enterprise systems cannot address at the required accuracy, timeliness, and auditability. This paper proposes an autonomous ESG compliance engine, a unified AI-blockchain architecture that ingests real-time emissions data across all three scopes, applies AI-driven anomaly detection and materiality assessment, commits verified emission records to an immutable blockchain audit ledger, and executes smart contract-based automated submission to regulatory bodies. The architecture integrates seven smart contracts covering scope ingestion, supplier attestation, anomaly detection, carbon credit verification, materiality assessment, regulatory report generation, and assurance export, providing end-to-end coverage of the ESG compliance lifecycle. The integration of AI-enhanced blockchain networks for climate monitoring and carbon credit verification, which demonstrated the technical feasibility of satellite and IoT data verification on distributed ledger infrastructure, provides the environmental data verification layer that feeds the enterprise compliance engine's carbon credit and scope verification processes. The autonomous intelligent enterprise paradigm, which positions AI and blockchain as jointly enabling autonomous compliance, governance, and reporting without manual intervention, provides the strategic architecture within which the proposed engine operates as a specific compliance instantiation. Evaluation against four commercially deployed sustainability platforms demonstrates that the proposed engine is the first system to simultaneously achieve real-time Scope 3 blockchain attestation, AI anomaly detection, and automated CSRD-compliant regulatory submission.