Amanda Williams
Sustainability Research Fellow, IMD
In 2015, the United Nations General Assembly established the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a set of 17 ambitious objectives to promote peace, prosperity, and sustainability around the globe by 2030. The goals include eliminating poverty and hunger, promoting good health and well-being, and taking dramatic action to combat climate change. Each SDG is supported by numerous subtargets and indicators. In July 2022, at the halfway point to the end date, the United Nations released The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2022. It stated that progress on the 17 goals was heading in reverse and called for “urgent action in order to rescue the SDGs and deliver meaningful progress for people and the planet by 2030.”
The conclusion should not have surprised anyone. Multiple interlinked and cascading emergencies, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate crisis, and the war in Ukraine, have impeded progress toward achieving the world’s shared vision for sustainable development by 2030. In addition to impeding progress on the SDGs, the aftermath of the cascading crises continues to impact the resilience of supply chains and businesses.
The sunny optimism that greeted the SDGs in 2015 is gone. Back then, many corporations quickly demonstrated support for the agenda as crucial partners in achieving the world’s vision of sustainable development on a global scale. Companies swiftly adopted the goals and incorporated them into their communications and sustainability reports. The SDGs quickly became the lingua franca among all stakeholders pursuing sustainable development. This widespread adoption marked a monumental achievement. Business had entered a new era of global sustainable development, and the SDGs offered hope for a holistic, systemic, and inclusive vision for collective action toward a better world.
But companies have largely fallen short of taking any new concrete actions to achieve the SDG goals. Their underwhelming engagement looks more like SDG washing, akin to the greenwashing companies commit when they market as “green” products that are only marginally more environmentally friendly than their counterparts. Companies that SDG-wash claim to contribute to societal level sustainability goals but lack proper evidence and actions to support the claim. In fact, SDG washing is more encompassing and potentially more detrimental than greenwashing, because it includes social, economic, and governance domains and is communicated to a broader range of stakeholders, including governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).
The authors of this study have conducted intensive research into the integration of the SDGs into the corporate strategy of firms. Their investigation has found that the majority of companies do engage with the SDGs, yet typically for PR and reporting purposes. More often than not, their activities lead to SDG washing.
However, they also identified a handful of companies that seek to integrate the SDGs into their corporate strategy. The study then focused on these firms to better understand these rare cases of in-depth SDG integration, so that they may serve as models for other companies in their industries at large. The practices and examples highlighted are based on the research, although the authors add several additional examples for illustrative purposes.
