How to become a leading business on advancing the Sustainable Development Goals: a Blueprint
On 25 September 2015, 193 countries wrote history by adopting the 2030 Agenda and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The 2030 Agenda is universal. It gives clarity on the world we want to live in, including an end to poverty, a protected planet, and peace and prosperity for all to enjoy. Its unprecedented scope requires all actors to take action to advance the SDGs.
Nearly two years later, at the end of September, I attended the Leaders Summit of the UN Global Compact, the world’s largest corporate sustainability initiative, to witness the launch of the Blueprint for Business Leadership on the SDGs. This is a document on what business can do to become leaders in advancing the SDGs, co-developed by Vivid Economics and the UN Global Compact.
The Blueprint couldn’t come at a better time: there was palpable momentum and a clear sense among the nearly 1,000 participants that robust business action that leads the way for others is vital for the successful realisation of the 2030 Agenda. The conference showed the SDGs are gaining traction among businesses, who increasingly realise that they cannot thrive unless people and planet are thriving. A strategic commitment to the SDGs also offers businesses a US$12 trillion revenue and savings opportunity, along with many other benefits including increasing employee satisfaction and an edge in the race to acquire and retain talented staff.
However, to realise their full potential, businesses will need to go further than they have to date. Many will need to ask the difficult questions and reinvent their core business models, with a long-term view to successfully address the systemic barriers that need to be overcome to realise the SDGs. A key theme of the day was that ‘business as usual’ must be turned into a future of ‘business unusual’.
Businesses that wish to set themselves the challenge to lead the way can refer to the Blueprint. It presents leadership as an evolving process, as businesses cycle through three steps: principled prioritisation to identify which SDGs to focus on; taking action on these SDGs; and sharing learnings internally and externally. Critically, to constitute leadership any actions must meet five leadership qualities: intentionality, ambition, consistency, collaboration, and accountability. These are illustrated in the figure with a set of guiding questions to assess whether action satisfies the qualities.
From our conversations with business representatives, both through the process of developing the Blueprint and at the Leaders’ Summit itself, we anticipate that this framework can provide a hugely valuable approach for thinking through corporate strategy on the SDGs.
We have also applied the thinking in the Blueprint to each of the SDGs. In each SDG brief, we identify key actions that businesses can take to advance the SDGs and highlight how businesses can apply the five qualities framework and account for the inherent interconnectedness of the SDGs to ensure that their action is leading. They provide real world examples of what leading action might look like that can inspire others to take similar action.
Over the next few months, the Blueprint material will be turned into a web-based tool that facilitates easy access and improved oversight, in order to extend its reach. We will also continue the conversations with businesses and other stakeholders to understand how we can turn the Blueprint into a widely used document that nurtures leading action at scale.