Blockchain Interoperability for Environmental Indicators: a Rapid Review
Sebastián Pandolfi, Laura González, Guzmán Llambías · 2025
Blockchain technology is increasingly being used to monitor environmental indicators (e.g. carbon dioxide retention). However, blockchains operate as isolated information silos, limiting their effectiveness in providing integrated global solutions. Several interoperability solutions exist, but they lack support for domain-specific requirements to interoperate. To the best of our knowledge, no literature review was performed to analyse blockchain interoperability of environmental indicators. This paper conducted a rapid review to identify, organise, and analyse sustainability-focused platforms, emphasising the role of interoperability for exchanging environmental data across blockchains. Based on the analysis of 20 papers, the findings highlight a strong emphasis on carbon-centric indicators, with a preference for smart contracts as modelling mechanism for environmental indicators. Secondly, domain-specific interoperability solutions are scarce and supports only a set of cross-chain operations and blockchain platforms. Finally, interoperability of environmental indicators poses additional challenges to cross-chain solutions, as the nature of environmental indicators requires additional cross-chain governance to manage eligibility and compliance mechanisms to validate off-chain measurements across blockchains.