Supporting Sustainable Development Goals Is Easier Than You Might Think

Companies and investors are being asked to support the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030 — what some have described as “the closest thing the Earth has to a strategy”— since the public sector alone does not have the resources to do so. At the same time, companies must create value for their shareholders to create the returns they need for their ultimate beneficiaries. In essence, both are being asked to do good and do well at the same time. This raises a number of obvious challenges that are surprisingly manageable: the key lies in leveraging the work of the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) in the context of the SDGs. In this paper we map the 30 generic ESG issues identified by the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) to the SDGs, and calculate a series of indexes able to assess the potential contribution for each industry to a given SDG