A Tertiary Review on Blockchain and Sustainability with Focus on Sustainable Development Goals

Blockchain as a disruptive technology and a driver for social changes has been applied to a wide range of applications, exhibiting a great potential to promote sustainable practices and help organizations and governments to achieve United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Literature reviews on blockchain and sustainability exist, but there is a need to consolidate existing results in terms of SDGs. This paper presents a tertiary review based on 28 existing literature reviews to investigate the relationship between blockchain and sustainability, focusing on SDGs. The findings include a novel mapping of impact-based interlinkage of blockchain and SDGs and a systematic overview of drivers and barriers to adopting blockchain for sustainability. Research gaps to overcome the barriers and enhance blockchain’s positive impacts on SDGs are identified. We found that blockchain applications are still in their early stages. Future empirical studies are needed regarding their large-scale deployment and long-term impacts on sustainability as well as standard tools and methods for implementing blockchain-based sustainable solutions from the software engineering perspective.