Aligning the SDGs with corporate strategy for value creation
The following companies have reviewed the SDGs against their strategy in order to prioritise their efforts at contributing to them:
AkzoNobel
AkzoNobel’s 2016 Annual Report provides a visual with coloured dots categorising the relevance of the SDGs to ‘Supply Chain and Operations’, ‘Products’ and Human Cities’ as main, intermediate or minor.
British Telecommunications Plc
BT have taken a novel approach in considering where the ICT industry as whole can contribute to achievement of the SDGs and have also explored “…the potential impacts on our business, if the Global Goals are not achieved by 2030 in the markets where we operate”.
Grupo Nutresa
Grupo Nutresa’s 2016 Integrated Report (pages 8-9) links the SDGs to their strategic priorities, identifying six which are aligned to a strategic priority and a further three (SDGs 1, 12 and 17) which are cross cutting.
SAB Miller Plc
SABMiller’s Sustainable Development Report 2016 links sustainable development and achievement of the SDGs to their strategic priorities.
Triodos Bank
Triodos Bank state that their 2016 annual report ‘is integrated’ and they welcome the trend in integrated reporting “because more integrated reports suggest that businesses consider their impact on society and the environment as core to their activities” (p 7). They describe how they respond to the SDGs at three levels ranging from ‘not harming’ the goals to playing a ‘catalyzing role’ towards ‘lasting systemic change’. They report extensively on how they apply these levels to each SDG41.
TSKB
TSKB is a Turkish Bank. Its Integrated Report 2016 (p 58-61) demonstrates that sustainable development is central to its strategy and critical to the value creation process by making it central to the materiality analysis for their integrated report.
Woolworths Holdings Ltd
Woolworths Holdings Ltd has developed an info graphic which identifies opportunities for shared value for each of its areas of strategic focus for sustainable development. These are then aligned with specific SDGs. An innovation is the number of partnerships disclosed for achieving each SDG. These include NGOs, research institutes, philanthropic foundations, private sector organisations and government agencies.
ArcelorMittal
Arcelor Mittal’s United Stated Integrated Report 2016 demonstrates how the six capitals are integrated into strategy, identifies ten sustainable development outcomes connected to their strategy and considers its integrated report as a key governance initiative of its Sustainable Development Committee. The report discusses the challenges and opportunities to create value presented by the ten sustainable development issues.
Cbus Superannuation Fund
Cbus’ Annual Integrated Report 2016 identifies which of the six capitals and SDGs it contributes to for each of its key activities identified as contributing to value creation.
City Developments Limited (CDL)
City Developments Limited (CDL)’s ‘Integrated Sustainability Report’ 201646 links the SDGs to the six capitals showing how their sustainability objectives and outcomes for the six capitals contribute to specified SDGs.
Itau Unibanco Holdings SA
Itau’s Integrated Report 2016 reports extensively on the multiple capitals and identifies material themes, the ‘capitals most exposed to each theme’, the stakeholders most affected and the SDGs to which they contribute for each theme.