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.

Realigning Priorities

4. Integrate

Integrating the SDGs into strategies and institutions is an opportunity to rewire the DNA of decision-making so that nations, businesses, and communities can minimize risk and grasp new opportunities.

Strengthen Institutional Linkages

National action on the SDGs will require three strands:

  1. delivering the SDGs domestically for national citizens,
  2. ensuring international development programming and policy supports the delivery of the SDGs in priority countries, c) ensuring that domestic action on the SDGs has a positive impact globally. As such, mainstreaming the Goals into government policy is an opportunity to rewire coordination across governments.

There are a number of different mechanisms for incorporating sustainable development into decision-making including councils, inter-ministerial planning units, and multi-stakeholder dialogue processes).

Example Germany's Institutional Framework For Mainstreaming Sustainable Development

The State Secretaries' Committee on Sustainable Development is a high level committee composed of all ministries' State Secretaries. Its secretariat is in the Chancellery. This committee is responsible for ensuring that sustainable development is a guiding principle of any policy of the German government. It is responsible for monitoring progress against the National Sustainable Development Strategy. The Chief Minister in the Chancellery/ Minister of Special Affairs chairs the State Secretaries Committee and is responsible for sustainable development. There are sustainability directors in each of the ministries.

Integration enables companies to understand internally, and - where relevant - communicate externally, how they create value and to better manage performance on critical issues.

"The 17 goals are interconnected, and all of them are relevant for any business to consider".

Susanne Stormer,

Novo Nordisk

Example The Benefits Of An Integrated Approach To Reporting

Early adopters of integrated reporting at a corporate level have experienced eight key benefits according to Black Sun research'

  1. Improved understanding of value creation
  2. Better understanding of risks and opportunities
  3. Greater focus on long term success
  4. Improved collaborative thinking by leaders about goals and targets
  5. Better ways of assessing performance
  6. Executives and management request and use a more holistic set of information to inform their decision making
  7. Reduced silos and increased respect and understanding between departments
  8. More collaborative thinking

UNDERSTAND INTERDEPENDENCIES

The SDGs are inextricably intertwined. They together form an integrated measurement framework that enables governments, businesses, and other actors to analyze the implications of a decision across the different impact areas. By focusing on any one Goal alone risks unintended consequences that might undermine achievement of another, and fails to take advantage of potential positive impacts across multiple Goals. For example, the OECD has established the 'Policy Coherence for Sustainable Development Partnership', an online platform which aims to bring together governments, international organizations, civil society, think-tanks, the private sector, and other stakeholders from all regions of the world committed to enhance policy coherence for sustainable development (SDG 17.14) as a key means of SDG implementation.

Jane Ambachtsheer,

"We are in the middle of a transition. Ten years from now people won't be having conversations about ESG as a separate discipline. ESG will be part of how one does business in the investment world".