UN Global SDGs

What are the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)?

The onus of achieving the SDGs is on all parties, in all areas, and at all levels of organisations and supply chains. Based on this premise, your organisation can definitely contribute to the achievement of the SDGs.

How are the SDGs relevant to your organisation?

The SDGs call for worldwide action among governments, business and civil society to end poverty and create a life of dignity and opportunity for all, within the boundaries of the planet. The SDGs explicitly call on all businesses to apply their creativity and innovation to solve sustainable development challenges. The SDGs have been agreed by all governments, yet their success relies heavily on action and collaboration by all actors.

The SDGs present an opportunity for business-led solutions and technologies to be developed and implemented to address the world’s biggest sustainable development challenges. As the SDGs form the global agenda for the development of our societies, they will allow leading companies to demonstrate how their business helps to advance sustainable development, both by minimizing negative impacts and maximizing positive impacts on people and the planet.

Covering a wide spectrum of sustainable development topics relevant to companies – such as poverty, health, education, climate change and environmental degradation – the SDGs can help to connect business strategies with global priorities. Companies can use the SDGs as an overarching framework to shape, steer, communicate and report their strategies, goals and activities, allowing them to capitalise on a range of benefits such as:

Enhancing the value of corporate sustainability

Whilst the business case for corporate sustainability is already well established, the SDGs may for example strengthen the economic incentives for companies to use resources more efficiently, or to switch to more sustainable alternatives, as externalities become increasingly internalized.

Strengthening stakeholder relations and keeping the pace with policy developments

The SDGs reflect stakeholder expectations as well as future policy direction at the international, national and regional levels. Companies that align their priorities with the SDGs can strengthen engagement of customers, employees and other stakeholders, and those that don’t will be exposed to growing legal and reputational risks.

Stabilising societies and markets

Business cannot succeed in societies that fail. Investing in the achievement of the SDGs supports pillars of business success, including the existence of rules-based markets, transparent financial systems, and non-corrupt and well-governed institutions.

Using a common language and shared purpose

The SDGs define a common framework of action and language that will help companies communicate more consistently and effectively with stakeholders about their impact and performance.

The goals will help bring together synergistic partners to address the world’s most urgent societal challenges.

Extracted from SDG Compass. Please see full report by clicking here for more details.

How does your organisation start its SDGs journey?

It’s important to understand that not all 17 SDGs will be equally relevant for your company or organisation. The extent to which your organisation can contribute to each goal, and the risks and opportunities that come with them depend on many factors. In taking a strategic approach to the SDGs, the first task should be to conduct an assessment on the current, potential, positive and negative impacts that your business activities have on the SDGs throughout the value chain. The SDG Compass provides guidance on the steps needed to make this assessment, and how to move forward from there.

For this purpose, the SDG Compass identifies five steps as follows:

These steps will help your organisation identify where positive impacts can be scaled up and where negative impacts can be reduced or avoided.

Extracted from SDG Compass. Please see full report by clicking here for more details.

From a practical perspective, let’s see an example of how an organisation can look at SDG 6: CLEAN WATER AND SANITATION

  • Fact 1: Poor water quality is an issue around the world where about 1 billion people lack access to potable water and over 1.6 billion lack access to improved forms of sanitation. The impact of poor water quality is significant on health and livelihoods of the world’s population.
  • Fact 2: There is risk to the supply of water supplies due to over-consumption and pollution across the world.
  • Fact 3: Water is a cross-cutting issue that impacts all SDGs, as without access to adequate amount of quality water, societies and communities’ activities can cease to operate.
Identifying future business opportunities

The SDGs aim to redirect global public and private investment flows towards the challenges they represent. In doing so they define growing markets for companies that can deliver innovative solutions and transformative change.

Organisations can choose to be water-wise.

Some of the obvious actions instituted by organisations in their daily operations are:                              

  1. Use less water – be conscious and frugal in consumption of water. For an organisation, this does not only mean saving water, being conscious of the cost of getting the water supply – i.e. the significant costs incurred by local councils (pump, treat, deliver, collect, retreat and return water to the system) to ensure adequate clean water is provided to the community.
  2. Soften the organisation’s environment (landscape) and operational processes. Construction of hard landscape such as buildings, roads, sidewalks without green spaces means that less and less water infiltration of water into the ground. Encouraging infiltration and water harvesting within your organisation’s compound or processes, are simple actions that can add up to a large social benefit.
  3. Supporting the local economy and source, where possible, locally produced supplies. The water footprint of imported goods is very high.
  4. For larger companies, ask for and identify the activities of your vendors and suppliers and impose on them good practices. This encourages a spill-over effect which will benefit the greater community.
  5. Examine the organisation’s waste disposal processes and see how it impacts on water quality and consumption.

These are examples of steps that can be instituted by an organisation in achieving SDG 6. There are of course many more. Consumers can, on their part, think about the marketing messages by manufacturer, vote with the dollar by purchasing sustainable products, efficient disposal of used items, being mindful of hidden consumption such as transportation, hygiene etc.

From these examples, you can see that instituting good practices in an organisation’s operations can have an impact on the achievement of SDG 6, (and many other SDGs). Having a proper management system in place, with well thought-out and documented policies, processes and procedures helps to achieve these goals.

Other useful resources: