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How companies can use Sustainable Development Goals in their businesses

The SDG is meant to be a comprehensive,  planned approach to complex problems of sustainable development at a worldwide level. But when challenged with an undertaking such as, companies may struggle with where to begin. Trying to cover it all would be operationally enormous and a waste of resources.

Some aims may be too broad or too remote. For example, “no poverty” is easy to write off as too far to bring out from a company’s business and value chain. While breadth is integrity for a public policy audience, managers need ways to prioritize and aim resources.

  • Segment the SDGs. 

First, segment the SDG fitting to your business in the market in such a way that helps start a ranking and captures some of the logic about which ones are most fitting to your business. One way to do this is to arrange the DGs into three main aim areas: people, planet, and policy principles. It’s useful to illuminate which goals are end-state goals and which are between goals designed to get to bigger goals.

  • Identify where the business fits. 

The next step involves recognizing which goals interconnect with some part of the company or its value chain’s activities. These are places where the business can have a meaningful effect and that can, in turn, have the widest and deepest effect in the biggest society. 

For example, the Coca-Cola Company operates near three areas: water, women, and well-being. Agribusiness Olam officially states zero hunger as its priority, and partnerships the way it would implement its initiatives. 

Some research discloses that it affected clean water, good jobs and economic growth, and innovation and infrastructure as well.

  • Make the business. 

At a business level, the interlace of the business case and the case for sustainability is complex. The overall innovators you studied have developed that integrated case and a story about it. For maximum success, it comes from the top of the business.

In 2017 it is vital for a much bigger swath of business to recognize the union of business  durability with sustainable development, as the private sector is called upon to fill an invalid gap created by the public sector’s retreat on broad, long-term global goals. It is equally critical to not permit the complexity and comprehensiveness of the goals to become a deterrent to a corporate action.

Given that the SDGs give a powerful framework for companies to mobilize, arrange both internally and with partners, and take action, the first step is to stop trying to visualize the entire SDG framework, and frame it as a ranking of connected and order goals. 

This helps prioritize and build logic for choice and to integrate the strategy for building a sustainable business with the company’s strategy for engaging in sustainable development. Companies that take this first step can join the league of inclusive innovators.