Sustainable Development Goals: Integrating sustainable initiatives with long-term value creation

Our planet continues to face many global economic, social, and environmental challenges and uncertainties. To help deal with them, in September 2015 many governments worldwide agreed to pursue 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Promoted by the United Nations, these SDGs define global priorities and aspirations for 2030 and rely on the important and value-creating role of business organizations in delivering on the promise of sustainable and inclusive development. SDGs will be both an opportunity and a challenge in the years ahead. Several business organizations across the globe have started this journey by identifying and executing sustainable strategies as key drivers of their visions and business models. The SDGs present an opportunity for business-led solutions and technologies to be developed, and they offer an overarching framework to shape, guide, measure, and report the value created through business objectives, initiatives, and performance. Measuring and reporting on these goals enable business organizations to contribute to the SDGs while capitalizing on a range of benefits such as identifying future business opportunities and strengthening stakeholder engagement. What are the Sustainable Development Goals? Where do they come from? Are companies ready to engage with them? How? What are the possible roles of management accountants in this space? We address (and perhaps answer) these questions by providing examples of a number of organizations—such as PepsiCo and Eni—that have been pioneering a certain degree of attention to the SDGs when measuring and reporting their business performances.