New Program to Hasten Business Action on UN Sustainable Development Goals

A new program focused on accelerating business performance on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has begun engaging more than 600 companies in 65 countries with a combined annual revenue of $1 trillion, according to the United Nations.

First announced last year by UN Secretary-General António Guterres at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, SDG Ambition Accelerator is an initiative that challenges and supports participating companies of the UN Global Compact in setting ambitious corporate sustainability targets and accelerating the integration of the SDGs into core business management.

The SDG Ambition Accelerator Program is a six-month learning journey for corporate executives being delivered through UN Global Compact Networks based in 30 countries. More than 1,150 representatives from participating companies, employing 7.9 million people, will join to assess current performance, risk areas, and new opportunities across their business. This will help companies take more ambitious business actions toward achieving the SDGs by 2030.  Outcomes from the first round of the Accelerator will be presented at the annual UN Global Compact Leaders Summit on June 15-16.

About the UN Global Compact

As a special initiative of the UN Secretary-General, the United Nations Global Compact is a call to companies everywhere – large and small – to align their operations and strategies with Ten Principles in the areas of human rights, labor, environment and anti-corruption. The purpose is to accelerate and scale the global collective impact of business by upholding the Ten Principles and delivering the Sustainable Development Goals through accountable companies and ecosystems that enable change. With more than 12,000 companies and 3,000 non-business signatories based in over 160 countries, and 69 Local Networks, the UN Global Compact is the world’s largest corporate sustainability initiative — one Global Compact uniting business for a better world.

The SDG Ambition Accelerator challenges and supports companies to:

• Strategically prioritize sustainability issues where they can have the greatest impact through their operations, products and services, and across the value chain;

• Set ambitious goals and identify critical pathways to achieve them;

• Integrate SDG-related business goals and outcomes into core business management processes; and

• Design technology systems to track progress on the goals across business units or functions

The SDGs hold great possibilities for all businesses. As I have written before, according to official predictions, businesses that participate in the Sustainable Development Goals – the goals that pertain to the ecology as well as human being – stand to experience an unbelievable windfall. The SDGs have the potential to unleash innovation, economic growth and development at an unprecedented scale and could be worth at least $12 trillion a year in market opportunities and generate up to 380 million new jobs by 2030.

CEOs observed:

Sanda Ojiambo, CEO & Executive Director of UN Global Compact, said: “By engaging hundreds of companies of all sizes and sectors from around the world, the UN Global Compact SDG Ambition Accelerator is working to mobilize a truly global movement of responsible enterprises to accelerate progress towards embedding sustainability into core business strategies and operations—not only for the benefit of society but for their own benefit as well.”

Julie Sweet, CEO of Accenture, said: “As we face the urgent challenges of rebuilding the global economy and tackling climate change, this is the moment for every business to take bold action and become a sustainable business with their customers and across their enterprises and supply chains. The SDG Ambition Accelerator will help companies embed sustainability into their core at greater speed and scale to make meaningful, measurable progress toward achieving the SDGs.”

Christian Klein, CEO of SAP, said: “In the future, profitability and sustainability will go hand in hand with the latter becoming a dimension of corporate decision making just like cost or growth. By combining our areas of expertise, we help businesses around the world to establish the foundational infrastructure they need to measure and actively steer their progress towards achieving the SDGs.”

Chairman and CEO of 3M, Michael Roman, said: “The COVID-19 pandemic has deeply impacted all of our lives and underscored the critical role that science and the business community have in solving global challenges. 3M is pleased to partner with the United Nations and other leading organizations to build a collaborative approach to improving lives around the world. We hope the SDG Ambition Accelerator will inspire other companies to join us in working to make this a Decade of Action.”

The SDG campaign is worthy of investigation by all businesses – even small businesses. It could help your companies, communities and marketplaces even if your participation isn’t 100%. More information on the SDG Ambition Accelerator can be found here: https://unglobalcompact.org/take-action/sdg-ambition