Achieving Sustainability Through Blockchain
Blockchain today is having an ever-emerging role when it comes to sustainability by enabling collaborations amongst consumers and producers, by helping people in adopting sustainable ways of living, and by helping corporations improve their sourcing, producing and recycling processes.
A major benefit of blockchain technology is that it ensures transparency in processing and logging and all other transactions.
In simple words, blockchain provides a verifiable record as to who buys what and from whom. This means that companies’ claims of being resource-positive and reducing their environmental impacts can be counter-checked and verified through audits.
Sustainability Brought By Blockchain
An increasing number of customers today demand sustainable practices in the choice of products they buy and brands they choose to be loyal to.
Forbes notes that around 60% of consumers are likelier to buy products with clearly defined sustainable practices. This is very evident in the success of apparel/fashion brands like Allbirds and Veja, both of which are well-known for their sustainable business processes.
Blockchain technology can help achieve sustainable development in myriads of ways to impact how resources are utilised for development and how companies and individuals can not only take but also give back to the environment.
The core competencies of blockchain technology — transparency, security, data audit-ability, privacy, value transfer, process efficiency and automation, can be leveraged to drive the systemic changes needed to deliver sustainable results.
The properties of blockchain- decentralised trust and immutable records, enable the real transfer of ownership. While it was only possible to copy data via the internet in the past, blockchain accelerates the move to an “internet of value”. This enables intangible or tangible assets like currencies, shares, infrastructure securities, data, or obligations like contracts to be exchanged, via the trusted ledger, without the need for intermediaries.
Recent Developments
The latest technological advances in blockchain are clustered around what could be called Blockchain 3.0, which focuses on addressing the drawbacks of the previous two generations of blockchain technology, such as scalability and interoperability between different blockchains. This invention has created a multitude of opportunities to solve the most enduring problems that have an impact on sustainability.
The UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development (CSTD) paid special attention to the importance of blockchain technology in the real economy at its annual meeting in May 2021, looking at the areas of trade, logistics and supply chains.
Following are 3 areas where blockchain can deliver results that are sustainable:
1) Digital Identity
One and a half billion plus people on this planet are devoid officially recognized identity. This has been caused due to global dislocation, wars, famines, and other natural disasters. It is among the most pressing issues facing urban systems. There is an increasing crisis in recording, updating, and correcting information about an existing identifiable person.
In its true essence, identity management is a cornerstone of all government services, but all legacy tools for data management fail to provide a secure, quickly accessible, and updatable identity.
Data centralised around the user: Personal identity management is an over $12 billion business which is expected to double by next year. The security, storage, and stealing costs of personal data are gigantic.
Previous solutions failures: There is noticeable hesitancy about the concerns over security and authentication failure of prior solutions.
Trust in government data: There is also a grave reservation among people regarding the ability to trust government data in any situation in absolute terms and in impacting the ability to deliver services to people in many developing nations.
The integrity of government data: Data integrity is as much of a problem from the inside of an organization than outside it. It is important that government data should be effectively protected from all insider threats attempting to manipulate or tamper with the stored data.
Data interoperability: The ability to verify the true integrity of government database independently in real-time enables data interoperability between systems and across geographic boundaries.
2) Healthcare
The latest COVID-19 pandemic is in its third year with no end in sight. From developed economies in the West to emerging ones in Africa and Asia, every country has struggled, mostly fruitlessly, for its containment within its borders. The world governments have tried to cooperate in a global effort to quell this sturdy viral epidemic from infecting and killing people in waves of variants. Blockchain’s distributed ledger technology (DLT) can also be utilized for tracking human vaccination records accurately.
Dr Tom Frieden, the former head of the Center for Disease Control (CDC), showed severe reservations about the safety of the COVID vaccination records and had several reasons to back his claim:
- No accuracy is maintained by utilizing a computerized vaccination information system, i.e., an online record of immunizations received by people in all parts of the world.
- No efforts or safeguards are implemented to ensure everyone’s data is secure and private.
- No options are available to use other forms of identity. For instance, a combination of paper vaccination records with additional personal verification, such as government issued photo ID.
- The system must verify vaccination records only and avoid adding more information about previous tests to avoid clustering of data.
All testing and vaccination data should be accessible in real-time, such as when people are going through airport security.
Blockchain can easily provide a solution for the delivery of quality healthcare and vaccination services.
3) Stronger and More Accountable Public Institutions
As recommended by Sustainable Development Goal 16 of the United Nations, one way to encourage sustainable development is to promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, providing access to justice and order for all, and building efficient, accountable, and inclusive institutions across all levels.
Government procurement is the most prominent way governments spend and, also, the greatest source of official government consumption and expenditure globally. These processes are highly complex, opaque, and subjective, leading to a large amount of wastage of public funds.
Transparency in these processes creates oversight and can add efficiencies to these tedious processes of using public resources.
Recently, the Colombia government tried a proof-of-concept for a blockchain-based procurement system. While the exercise proved that blockchain technology alone is not enough, but can be a powerful tool when combined with public inclusion in the process.
Blockchain has been an important source of innovation in the private sector and can be used for impacting the public sector with ideas that create pathways for sustainable development.
Article References:
https://www.un.org/en/un-chronicle/blockchain-and-sustainable-growth
Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text above belong solely to the author, and don’t reflect views of the author’s employer, organization, committee, or other group or individual.
