SQ Consult Sergio Ugarte co-authored the Publication “SDGs mean Business: How credible standards can help companies deliver the 2030 agenda”.
This 2017 report by WWF and ISEAL explores how businesses can use credible voluntary sustainability standards to unlock new market opportunities and contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Several concrete examples of Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP) are provided.
The report frames the SDGs as “quickly becoming a universal language for governments, businesses and NGOs to engage each other around shared sustainability aims, commitments, outcomes and impacts. They provide a holistic framework that allows, and indeed requires, businesses to contribute to their achievement over the next 15 years.”
The report shows how sustainability standards can help ‘scale-up’ efforts to achieve the SDGs: Credible sustainability standards and certification schemes are a key tool in market transformation and its contribution to the SDGs. Credible standards provide guidance on what better production looks like in a concrete and practical way, focused on a specific process, sector or industry. This helps businesses to address the biggest impacts in a specific sector. In doing so, a standard typically contributes across a number of SDGs. By bringing together different actors (businesses, NGOs, governments, etc.), credible standards embody the multistakeholder, partnership approach which is central to the SDG agenda.
For more information contact: Sergio Ugarte
