Blockchain in Environmental Sustainability Measures: a Survey

TL;DR

The paper surveys how blockchain can improve environmental sustainability by ensuring verifiable monitoring, recording, and enforcement across GHG emissions, carbon management, solid waste, plastics, food waste, water, and circular economy. It maps objectives, stakeholder roles, frameworks, and supporting technologies, while highlighting scalability, privacy, and interoperability challenges. The work identifies implementation states and publicly available source code, providing a grounded view of practical opportunities and remaining gaps. Overall, blockchain offers architectures for MRV, trading, and rewards that can enhance trust and efficiency in environmental policy and practice, though real-world deployments must carefully address governance, data standards, and energy costs. The findings underscore a need for standardized protocols and open demonstrations to accelerate adoption and impact.

Abstract

Real and effective regulation of contributions to greenhouse gas emissions and pollutants requires unbiased and truthful monitoring. Blockchain has emerged not only as an approach that provides verifiable economical interactions but also as a mechanism to keep the measurement, monitoring, incentivation of environmental conservationist practices and enforcement of policy. Here, we present a survey of areas in what blockchain has been considered as a response to concerns on keeping an accurate recording of environmental practices to monitor levels of pollution and management of environmental practices. We classify the applications of blockchain into different segments of concerns, such as greenhouse gas emissions, solid waste, water, plastics, food waste, and circular economy, and show the objectives for the addressed concerns. We also classify the different blockchains and the explored and designed properties as identified for the proposed solutions. At the end, we provide a discussion about the niches and challenges that remain for future research.

Figures (9)

• Figure 1: Content and organization of this paper: Applications of blockchain on the management of carbon, GHG emissions, solid waste, plastic waste, water, food waste, and circular economy.
• Figure 2: Blockchain features in environmental monitoring: inherent ones, and acquired ones, identified in this paper.
• Figure 3: Objectives pursued in reported blockchain applications for management of GHG emissions.
• Figure 4: Three objectives pursued in blockchain applications for Carbon management.
• Figure 5: Stages of solid waste management for the application of blockchain.