Blockchain-enabled esg reporting framework for sustainable supply chain

Abstract

Nowadays sustainability has received global attention in supply chain. To evaluate the sustainability level, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting is widely adopted especially for the listed companies. However, due to the lack of data authentication, consistency, and transparency, the ESG-based sustainability evaluation is still inadequate. To address those challenges, this paper proposes a blockchain-based ESG reporting framework for facilitating the sustainability evaluation of listed company. Firstly, a fact-telling blockchain gateway is designed to facilitate the raw data authentication issues. It plays the role of light node to transfer the data of smart infrastructure/devices to the blockchain network, which satisfies both privacy and transparency. Secondly, a versioning smart contract mechanism is developed to verify the consistency between the raw data and the final ESG report. Thirdly, a token-based sustainability evaluation mechanism is used to evaluate the behaviors of listed company in the sustainable supply chain. The discussion analyzes the benefits and potential obstacles of utilizing the proposed framework in the ESG reporting preparation, generation, and publication. The results of this study contribute a reliable approach to facilitate the sustainability-level evaluation of listed company.