What are the potentials for using the blockchain for reporting on sustainable development?

Blockchain technology has disruptive potential in sectors that involve transactions between parties. People wanting to use blockchain-based smart contracts to facilitate trust-less and tamper-proof transactions are emerging by the day. Blockchain also has potential to reward countries in the world for smarter and more sustainable development. It can for example mobilise progress on the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by providing financial rewards to governments. Let me explain this idea.

First a bit about the SDGs, which are globally agreed development goals that focus on elimination of poverty, access to education, health care, gender equality, water and sanitation, and the environment.

There are 17 goals:

What do these goals have to do with the blockchain?

Blockchain based initiatives are already beginning to address core sustainability issues. These include decentralized and resilient power distribution and trade (PowerLedger or SolarCoin), identity verification (Civic), micro financing (MicroMoney), remittance transfers (Everex) and others. Smart meter energy trading and electronic remittances transfers are nothing new but may be done cheaper, faster and safer through blockchain. For the UN SDGs, this potential is yet to be tapped.

The business case: Progress reporting on the SDGs

While based on an international agreement, governments have to implement the SDGs at home in their countries. Each year they have to share achievements and challenges at the global level. Then progress reports are available online for people to read and compare.
See here: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/vnrs/

Running the annual SDG progress reports on a dedicated blockchain could improve their quality and impact. For example the UN could introduce a reporting system, which uses a certified reputation score based on reporting countries progress they progress against the set targets of the SDGs. Then governments could report their progress and it would instantly be accessible and available to all concerned stakeholders, through to the wider public. This system could be combined with an open voting for the best reports, much like how articles on Steemit are upvoted by readers and good authors rewarded with tokens that have either reputational or real USD financial value.

It is very possible to imagine such a system, wherein readers judge annual reports according to set criteria such as legitimacy, innovativeness, and tangible progress and in turn reward SDG tokens to the best reports. Governments who do a good job at reporting (and who are judged by their national peers to report honestly) would be rewarded with SDG tokens. They can then use them to finance additional areas that require funding for countries to progress towards the SDGs. Thus, combining the SDGs with the blockchain would potentially unleash a new source of reputation-based funding, as well as make progress reporting transparent and much more efficient; these are two core means of implementation of the SDGs.

Risks

Currently financial regulators are trying to figure out how to regulate crypto currencies, their trade, and especially the emerging ICOs of which many may be unsound. A lot of uncertainty therefore prevails. Recent trends indicate a differential regulatory treatment of ‘dividend’ vs. ‘utility’ tokens or coins. The former is viewed as a security, which calls for a certain tax to be levied. Utility tokens do not have the same strict regulations yet. An SDG token should not aim to be traded or stored for dividends. It would rather be a ‘utility’. To spur spending of rewarded tokens, issuers (the UN) could ‘burn’ unspent tokens annually or within an agreed timeframe to incentivize token winners to spend them on their intended purpose – to pay for implementation of sustainable development. There are probably other risks related especially to safe and anonymous (but accountable) voting by peers, which would have to be carefully considered and made easily available on smartphones.

What to do with this then?

I only entered the cryptosphere in early 2017 and it is a steep learning curve. But I do have more than a decade of experience with sustainable development research and practice and can provide more background information on the SDGs and their reporting systems. If any blockchain experts and enthusiasts out there would be willing to discuss or provide feed back on the ideas reflected here, I would be grateful. And who knows, maybe we could turn this into a proposal to improve sustainable development progress reporting to make it smoother, more transparent and more accountable to the people.