To embed, copy and paste the code into your website or blog: Blockchain technology is increasing in popularity across industries but, in its current iteration, triggers significant environmental, social, and governance ( ESG) considerations. As the financial services sector simultaneously invests in blockchain technology and commits to ESG-sensitive policies and portfolios, how are the “E” and “S” impacts of blockchain and its applications to be weighed? Blockchain, the digital infrastructure popularized by the Bitcoin cryptocurrency and now expanding into data validation and transfer uses in fields from supply chains to healthcare to governance, is a digital distributed ledger system that records and verifies information in real-time, without reliance on a central authority to verify the data. For effective data validation in the absence of a centralized monitor, a “block” of data may only be added to an existing “chain” when a disperse network of individual users agree to add the block by solving complex computational problems and verifying the solutions in a process called “mining”. This system, called “proof of work” (