Global Goals That Work
Over the last decade, there has been a proliferation of sustainability indexes and frameworks. This report attempts to bring greater alignment between actors and better ways to measure progress using our planet's health and people's well-being as the yardstick, rather than Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or profit alone. Read the report to learn how sustainability is measured at government, business, and societal levels, and how it can be aligned to the triple bottom line (people, planet, profit) and the SDGs.
In Short
The Opportunity
In market terms, the SDGs represent a host of opportunities. As global and national policies develop to meet the SDGs so new markets will emerge: 20 million electric vehicles are expected to be on the road by 2020 (SDG 13 on climate change); Asia's 'Base of the Pyramid' has an aggregate income of $3.47 trillion (SDG 10 on Inequality). The 17 SDGs are an 'innovation map' for what the world needs.
But the SDG framework offers a much bigger opportunity to understand human progress from market value alone – it provides a dashboard of indicators to monitor the macro trends, opportunities, and risks that face our global systems. Our economies are more interconnected than ever before – mortgage defaults in Florida can result in a global financial crash; floods in Thailand can mean job losses in the UK. If the SDG framework can be made relevant and applicable at different levels of operation – global, national, corporate, local – then it can become a powerful strategic tool for identifying the connections between these compounding risks and opportunities.