UN’s sustainable development goals on agenda for growing number of businesses

Becoming more sustainable is increasingly a no-brainer from an environmental, ethical, but also an economic perspective. Reducing carbon and the UN sustainable development goals (SDGs) feature on the “to-do” agenda for a growing number of businesses as they seek to assess their performance in this regard and ascertain how they can do better.

Carbon is the currency of sustainability, says Brian O'Kennedy, managing director of Clearstream Solutions. He says companies that have been diligently working to fundamentally remove carbon from their supply chains in recent years are those that will perform better financially into the future.

"The CEO of Logitech recently described carbon as 'the new calorie' for business as they begin to count every ounce of carbon they are responsible for. Carbon is such a useful tool to predict how a company will perform in the future because carbon equals money, so reducing carbon saves money. This was the initial impetus for companies but now we need to see all stakeholders engage on the topic of understanding carbon and climate change risk to businesses," he says.

Assessing and measuring carbon emissions not only gives companies a baseline from which they can set goals for carbon reduction, it also adds urgency, O’Kennedy says.

“What gets measured gets done. It helps to avoid ‘greenwashing’ and generic CSR-type conversations, and instead use carbon to measure the impact of environmental sustainability.”

Carbon emissions

Clearstream is involved in the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) which gives organisations a rating based on their carbon “performance”. In the past 12 months it has seen a 50 per cent increase in the number of companies measuring and disclosing their carbon emissions to CDP.

“Companies need a baseline so that they can realise what they need to do in order to reduce their emissions,” says O’Kennedy.

Indeed, he says many companies, both big and small, are on the right track, but just not moving quickly enough.

“There are signs that there is a significant shift happening in terms of renewable energy so there are a lot of positive things, and we are decarbonising the electricity in our grid quite quickly and we are also getting better with fuels, being more efficient and using biomaterials. Removing the carbon that is embedded in our supply chains and products, that’s where we are falling down and where the next phase of the work has to happen.”

Business in the Community Ireland (BITCI) has been driving the sustainability agenda for 21 years, and work with the largest companies in Ireland. Its CEO Tomás Sercovich says the 17 sustainable development goals adopted by all UN member states in 2015 are about ensuring a sustainable, low-carbon economy and an inclusive society where everyone thrives.

“For business this is mission critical – it is about having a vision and a strategy to ensure your business will be successful in the future. Businesses don’t succeed when societies fail or when the planet is irreversibly damaged,” he says.

Yet despite a strong awareness of the SDGs in Ireland during the initial years following their adoption, Sercovich feels they have fallen down the agenda somewhat.

“We all need to work on making this agenda real and tangible for all business. You educate companies on the SDGs with simple messages; it is not about saving the world, but about how your operations can be more aligned to the principles of the goals and seeing that all companies can contribute to this agenda.

“It is about value-creation for the future, it is about the legacy of your business, it is about attracting talent that wants to work for companies with a genuine purpose, and essentially it is about avoiding the risk of making your business irrelevant.”

Resource-use

The SDGs help to “widen the conversation”, says O’Kennedy. “Sustainable development goal 13 is specifically related to climate change, but there are others focused on resource-use and water which also promise significant environmental impacts.

“While companies are getting better at reducing carbon, they are starting to realise that there is a much wider range of initiatives that they need to be aware of outside of the pure carbon piece.”

As a result companies are also beginning to measure their positive and negative impacts on the broader sustainability agenda as they align with the SDGs.

“They’re very useful because they are very clear, and they offer a range of targets that make these top-level goals much more practical and deliverable than people realise. That’s the next level we need to get to.”