BUS604: Innovation and Sustainability

The Global Goals are highly integrated, which means progress on all of them is needed to open up all the business benefits they offer, as well as the overall societal gains. For instance, the research shows that effective action on climate change can be linked to achieving the objectives of strong economic growth and ending poverty, while access to affordable energy will help reduce inequality and support sustainable industrialisation in the developing world. At the same time, major investments in infrastructure and innovation will be needed to meet the environmental targets set in the Global Goals. 

Links between the social and environmental goals are also marked: sustainable management of land and water ecosystems will help improve agricultural productivity and eliminate hunger and malnutrition, while climate action, better housing, and less polluted cities will have widespread benefits for health and wellbeing. Progress on the education goal is linked to improvement on more goals than any other. 

Achieving the Global Goals will certainly require new regulations. These are likely to include measures to address greenhouse gas emissions and encourage resource efficiency, like mandated carbon and water pricing (see Section 2.4 below and Section 3.7); regulations to protect labour rights and address discrimination in employment; and policies that strengthen governance, for instance, by tackling corruption and clarifying land rights. 

Some of these policies will add costs for individual businesses which, conventionally, business leaders might be expected to resist. And some of the goals may appear to lie beyond the responsibility of business, such as quality education and good health and well-being for everyone. However, the major market opportunities described in this section will not open up and go on growing without a healthy, productive, secure global workforce – formal and informal – with money to spend. They won't be sustainable unless resources are priced for all competitors at levels that boost innovation while making sure current resource stocks last as long as possible. So there is a powerful business, as well as moral, case for the private sector to back progress towards all the Global Goals as they try to capture those market opportunities.