Social innovations are grassroots processes aiming to achieve impacts beyond anindividual level and towards a broader societal good. The environmental dimen-sion of impacts refers to any direct change to the environment resulting fromsocial innovation activities, products, or services, which are not addressed by pre-existing systems. In this paper, we determine the role of social innovation inaddressing environmental impacts byanalyzing a database of social innovationexamples in European and circum-Mediterranean rural areas, compiled within theH2020 Project SIMRA. We conceptualize the overall aim of environmentally-focused social innovation initiatives as furthering the sustainable development oftheir territories. To address the environmental impacts of initiatives in a struc-tured way, we use the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) classification, todescribe social innovation environmental impacts in relation to specific targets.We analyzed 238 initiatives from the SIMRA catalog and associated initiativewebsites to identify and classify their direct environmental impacts. Our resultsindicate that 68% of the cases have at least one direct environmental impact thataligns with a SDG target. The most common impacts are related to sustainablenatural resource management (SDGs target 12.2), sustainable food productionsystems (2.4), and equal access to land (2.3). This SDG-based classification provedto be a useful analytical tool for categorizing internationally policy-relevant envi-ronmental impacts of social innovations.