Data spaces as enablers for sustainability

One of our society's most fundamental challenges is promoting sustainable development. Data sharing across organizations is one way to spur innovation and address the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through optimizing resource utilization, fostering circular supply chains, and producing accurate information about CO2 emissions. However, organizations often hesitate to share data given a range of concerns, including the fear of data misappropriation or the lack of control over what others do with their data. Data spaces as a novel artifact seek to tackle these issues by providing an integrated data management approach upholding data sovereignty. These spaces can boost sustainable development by being a secure and trusted digital infrastructure for organizations to share data for sustainable purposes. To disclose how this digital solution fosters sustainability, we present a set of 65 potentials of data spaces along with the dimensions of ecological, economic, and social sustainability.