When talking about sustainability the general public often thinks about environmental sustainability only.
However, sustainability researchers
and activists have a much broader definition: Sustainability is defined as
meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future
generations to meet their needs.
While this is a simple and therefore
appealing definition, the devil is in the details. For instance, it is rather
hard to know the needs of future generations — as we often struggle to
understand even our own needs.
What is quite clear by now is that
such an approach, aiming at a good livelihood for all, has to consider both:
natural systems as well as human systems and think them together. Today, we
still struggle to meet even the basic needs of many people of our present
generations.
While on the other side those who are
already well off, live lifestyles that more often than not are depleting and
destroying nature and natural systems at an unprecedented speed, possibly
corrupting everyone’s ability to meet their needs in the long and increasingly
also on the short run. Sustainability problems like the climate and
biodiversity crisis, economic inequality, poverty pose great challenges to
humanity.
To help tackle these global challenges
the United Nations have defined the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) intending
to produce a set of universal goals that meet the urgent environmental,
political, and economic challenges facing our world.
Isn’t Blockchain un-sustainable?
Blockchain-based applications provide
many opportunities to help us create a more sustainable world.
They can provide
- More transparency about individual and collective action, as well as reliable provenance within global supply chains.
- Strengthen accountability loops and reduce bureaucracy and power asymmetries enabling new types of applications
- Incentivize environmentally friendly behavior with purpose-driven tokens.
The lack of transparency along the
supply global supply chains creates challenges regarding fraud, pollution,
human rights abuses, and other inefficiencies. The sustainable behavior of
individuals and companies is therefore currently hard to track and not well
rewarded. In this context, Blockchain has the potential to provide unprecedented
levels of transparency, with a shared, decentralized database were immutable
and encrypted copies of the information stored on every computer (node) in the
network. This enables otherwise trust-less parties, such as individuals and
firms that do not know each other, to engage in near-frictionless peer-to-peer
transactions. Blockchains can therefore serve as a transparent bookkeeping
machine that everyone can inspect (public and permissionless blockchain) or a
limited group of people can inspect (private and federated blockchains, also
referred to as DLT). This type of transparency has applications (1) along the
supply chain of goods and services, (2) in institutional settings, for less
corruption and more accountability.
You can contact us or
directly send a mail to hello@codezeros.com for further inquiries regarding
Blockchain development. Share your ideas with and create a secure world
together.
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