5.1.3. Imperative for Change and Commitment to Measure SDGs

Participant 13 explained the key part that SDGs contribute to the company's approach to the broader sustainability agenda: "The SDGs and our impacts on them are of huge relevance to our industry. We are already fully committed to measuring our impact across the triage of economic, social and environmental sustainability themes. Our leadership is fully committed to owning delivery success against these targets, which we jointly assess with our tier 1 contractors. It is now considered core business to ensure the right levels of scrutiny and governance to manage sustainable development performance. In future, this will include measurement against SDG targets but, for now, we need to find a practical method for doing this well." The final comment in the extract highlights the difficulty of moving from "knowing to doing".

Many commented on the link between SDG measurement and their company's values. For example, participant 5: "because our purpose is far more than simply generating revenues for shareholders . . . for us, it is about influencing those solutions to provide the right long-term infrastructure for society. So, we provide jobs and the right training and we provide the infrastructure we need to connect life together; everything we do depends on it—to try to capture the way we go about doing that in more modern ways for future societies". Although many were better able to relate progress stories with their sustainability measurement, there were others, such as participant 28: "the whole world has decided how it can be rapidly made better, so the 169 SDG targets are a compass for humanity".

The theme of creating shared value [59,60] was commented on by a number of participants (2, 5, 8, 10, 11, 13 and 19), one of whom, a CEO, commented, "Since becoming Responsible Business of the Year, we have been working hard to show others how sustainability makes good business sense." This quote emphasises that the notion of creating shared value (CSV) [59,60], whilst not always using the specific language of CSV, is a growing reason to engage with SDGs and sustainability more generally.

The global context and the relationship of the global SDG goals to businesses was a common theme, as indicated by participant 24, head of infrastructure for his company, who said "in a world where populations are increasing, cities are expanding and the effect on our environment is more apparent than ever before, the need for infrastructure that is affordable, sustainable and effective is vital. Engineers have a pivotal role to play in designing infrastructure that is not only effective but does not harm the environment in which we live".

The first major finding derived from this analysis is as follows.

Findings #1: to achieve the outcomes of measuring SDG impacts at subnational level, business priorities can be aligned across economic, environment and society ambitions, and it can make good business sense to do this.
