Session
WE.1.B || SDG as a Basis for Sustainability Assessments of Products and Companies
Authors
Saling, Peter
Abstract
In 2015, the UN introduced global, overarching goals for a sustainable development – the SDGs. Since the economic sector is crucial to achieve them, many companies generate ideas, strategies, and businesses to make the world more sustainable. Companies contribute in different ways to the SDGs as a strategic objective. We developed a method within the SEEbalance approach as a separate module containing metrics that can address impacts to SDG along value chains for products. We focus with the new approach on challenges of products against the SDG from a risk perspective. We want to identify them and help businesses to improve the impacts and to suggest measures as a follow-up activity. The targets and sub-targets of the SDG help to find key aspects that should be considered. In the analysis, main social focus topics discussed by stakeholders, societies, NGO etc. will be selected and highlighted. If there is a negative effect found, it will be linked to the most relevant SDG. The findings are compared against “best of class” and “worst of class” benchmarks related to ratings of countries in the world. With this kind of a normalization step we can transfer single information to numerical scores linked to color codes results as well. They can be aggregated in overview graphs to allow an easy interpretation and use the results in decision-making activities.