Leading companies are taking action both inside and outside their fence lines to reduce their own emissions and become more resilient to inevitable climate impacts. C2ES has found that, internally, companies are seeking a deeper understanding of the risks and opportunities of a changing climate, and are taking steps to reduce their carbon footprints (the emissions from producing their products) and their handprints (emissions from the sales and use of their products). Externally, they are engaging suppliers, customers, key stakeholders and policymakers, and are publicly reporting emissions and energy-usage data, climate-related risks and management strategies. Companies are also demonstrating their commitment to climate action by partnering with other companies and stakeholders on solutions and by publicly supporting policies like the Paris Agreement.

Climate Action Plans

 The first step for many companies is to develop climate action plans across the company and for individual business units. The components of a climate action plan depend on the type of company and the goals it wants to achieve, but every company faces a few general decisions, such as:

• whether the plan is designed through a “top-down” or “bottom-up” process

• whether to establish one or more targets – and if so, of what type and how

• how targets fit in with other environmental management activities

• to what extent the plan features market mechanisms such as internal carbon price and/or and external carbon offsets

• how to use research and development resources and other means to drive innovation.

Once targets are established, they can drive innovation within the company, spurring internal programs and products that can help the company meet its goals. Sometimes the mere existence of emissions or energy use data generates interest and ideas for improvements that turn out to be profitable on their own.

Goals and Targets

A growing number of companies have voluntarily adopted climate-related targets. The type of target an individual company chooses depends on its products and production methods, policy environment, and business models. Some targets focus on reducing greenhouse gases, and others on energy use. Some serve as absolute limits, and others are relative to production levels and revenues. Goals and targets can also apply to supply chain purchases or use of company products.

Nearly 300 companies have set a greenhouse gas emission reduction target “in line with climate science.” More than 100 have set goals to be powered by 100 percent renewable energy. Other companies, such as Microsoft, are adopting operational carbon neutrality goals.  Some companies purchase carbon offsets from projects such as reduced deforestation to help achieve their emission goals more cost-effectively.

Companies have found that addressing climate also makes good business sense. Greenhouse gas targets have helped them save money, generally through improvements in energy and operational efficiency. They have also seen reduced production costs and enhanced product sales, making them more competitive.

Companies have also found these internal policies help prepare them for future regulation by investing in emissions reductions now. They’ve also protected and enhanced their reputation with customers and shareholders.

Internal Carbon Pricing

One business strategy gaining traction among leading businesses is internal carbon pricing, which assigns a price to carbon emissions attributable to the business. More than 1,200 companies worldwide are either pursuing internal carbon pricing or preparing to do so in the coming two years—up 23 percent from 2015.

Companies that establish a corporate carbon price assign a monetary value to CO2 emissions associated with a business activity. This price signal is factored into investment decisions, providing an incentive for the company to move from emissions-intensive programs and products to low-carbon, climate-resilient alternatives.

Nearly 300 companies have set a greenhouse gas emission reduction target in line with climate science. More than 100 have set goals to be powered by 100 percent renewable energy.

Energy Efficiency

Improved energy efficiency has emerged as a key component of corporate climate change strategies. Companies participating in the global EP 100 initiative pledge to double their energy productivity (dollar of output per unit of energy), which has the potential to save more than $2 trillion globally by 2030.

Leading firms that give greater attention to energy efficiency report billions of dollars in savings and millions of tons of avoided greenhouse gas emissions. Efficiency strategies can encompass internal operations, supply chains, products and services, and cross-cutting issues.

Companies that take on carbon footprinting and reduction strategies quickly come to see their energy use in a whole new light. When companies calculate their carbon footprint, they typically find that their energy consumption accounts for the great majority of their directly measurable emissions impact. Suddenly, energy shifts from perhaps a small cost item to the biggest piece of their carbon footprint. Viewed from this perspective, energy efficiency becomes a sustainability imperative.

Corporate energy efficiency strategies are most effective when:

• Efficiency is an integral part of corporate strategic planning and risk assessment;

• leadership and organizational support are real and sustained;

• the company has SMART (specific, measurable, accountable, realistic, and time-bound) energy efficiency goals;

• the strategy relies on a robust tracking and measurement system;

• the organization puts substantial resources into efficiency;

• the energy efficiency strategy shows results; and

• the company effectively communicates efficiency results internally and externally.

Innovative Finance

Companies are also employing a wide range of innovative financial tools to achieve their climate and energy goals:

• Energy producers and utilities often offer their customers on-bill financing, which allows a homeowner or commercial building owner to invest in energy efficiency improvements, with payments added on to their utility bills. This removes the high upfront costs of efficiency improvements, and encourages building owners to work directly with utilities on efficiency projects.

• Large energy buyers also participate in green pricing programs (also known as green tariffs). U.S. utilities that offer these programs allow eligible customers to buy energy at a premium from a renewable project directly operated by the utility, or by issuing a renewable energy certificate (REC) from a renewable project. This allows businesses to use sources like wind, solar, low-impact hydro, biomass, landfill gas, and geothermal.

• Some companies and banks are tapping into the rise in investor demand to finance environmentally sound projects by issuing green bonds or sustainability bonds. Green bonds act as a vehicle for institutional investors seeking to put their capital in projects that address climate change, and help drive innovation and development of low-carbon products. Like conventional bonds, green bonds can be issued by a corporate, bank, or government entity. The debt insurance by investors means that the companies do not need to tap into their limited credit lines or cash reserves to fund renewable or energy efficiency projects. While green bonds help support projects with a positive environmental impact, sustainability bonds work like green bonds, but also focus on the social impact.

Originally published on C2ES (n.d.). You can read more here.

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]]>Business Strategies to Address Climate ChangeBizfor2030Fri, 06 Mar 2020 21:17:52 +0000http://www.businessfor2030.org/bizfor2030blog/how-companies-can-align-their-materials-strategy-to-the-sdgs-aswwk55e45319e4b0fe8647d43b01:55e5cccce4b00dea70e6075e:5e62b7b6035e4e0504faeb46Guest post by Stephen J. Ubl
President & CEO, PhRMA
Originally published on PhRMA website in February, 2020 

As public officials scramble to construct a comprehensive plan to contain the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), some USCIB members are taking necessary action through public-private partnerships or employing company resources to contain the outbreak.

PhRMA members, which include USCIB members Bayer, Gilead Sciences, Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer, have dedicated the following programs and initiatives to combat COVID-19:

• Bayer donated financial and medical resources to support those affected by the outbreak in China. Donations have been made to the Chinese Red Cross, which works directly with Chinese health authorities to aid with the crisis.

• Gilead Sciences is working directly with government organizations and public health officers to support clinical trials to diagnosed patients . Gilead is also accelerating its process in developing a novel antiviral drug, Remdesivir, which has gained recognition for treating Ebola and Marbug.

• Johnson & Johnson launched an investigational vaccine developmental program through collaborations with Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR), and the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. J&J is also analyzing previously tested medicines that can reduce the severity of COVID-19 symptoms and lower fatality rates.

• Pfizer has completed its preliminary assessment of antiviral compounds similar to that of cultured cells found in COVID-19 cases. The company is now working with a third party to speed the screening process and is expecting results in late March. Depending on toxicology results, Pfizer hopes to move to clinical development by no later than the end of 2020.

While many of these initiatives are in direct response to an evolving public health crisis, they also meet one of the “means of implementation” criteria within UN Sustainable Development Goal 3: Ensure Healthy Lives. Most notably, these initiatives meet “means of implementation 3.d: strengthening the capacity of all countries…for early warning, risk reduction and management of national and global health risks.”

Originally published on PhRMA (February, 2020). You can read more here.

The way we produce, (re)use and dispose of or recycle our materials has an impact on nearly every one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a collection of 17 global 2030 goals introduced by the United Nations in 2015. Also known as the Global Goals, the SDGs were designed to be universal (for both developed and developing countries), holistic (people-centered and planet-sensitive) and measurable. They include 169 targets and aim to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all.

For the textile industry, "SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production" is a gateway to many of the other SDGs. More sustainable cultivation of cotton, wool, wood and other natural raw materials aligns with the "Zero Hunger" and "Life on Land" goals. Converting to renewable energy and deploying cleaner technologies in the fiber processing stages have a positive effect on the "Clean Water and Sanitation," "Industries, Innovation and Infrastructure" and "Climate Action" goals. And designing out waste, keeping materials in use longer and regenerating farmland plays an important role in reducing carbon emissions, a major target of the "Climate Action" goal. The textile industry has a powerful opportunity to shift the needle in both producer and consumer contexts.

The Global Goals have been widely adopted by governments, NGOs and businesses. In some cases, companies have a stronger lever to pull than governments do. By aligning their business and sustainability strategies to the Global Goals — or more radically, reshaping their business models — companies are able to position themselves as global leaders, rather than merely business leaders, and reframe their achievements as wins for the world. Not only does business hold the key to long-term SDG success but the SDGs will help shape business transformation. 

How can companies level up their Global Goals alignment?

Every year, Textile Exchange publishes a Material Change Index that tracks the fashion industry’s progress toward more sustainable materials sourcing, as well as alignment with global efforts such as the SDGs and the transition to a circular economy. There are some key activities that top performers in the SDGs category have in common. These should serve as inspiration for companies that are looking to push their alignment to the next level. Textile Exchange also will be sharing a more detailed analysis of findings later in 2020.

1. Embed into business 

To ensure long-term benefits for all, companies should integrate the SDGs into business models and strategies. To do this successfully requires getting key stakeholders (including employees, suppliers and investors) on board and on the same page. Through materiality assessment or plain, old-fashioned conversations, the top performers make sure to factor perspectives from across the business into the development of their strategies for positive SDG action.

Material change in action: Gap Inc. aligned its sustainability framework with the U.N.’s Sustainable Development agenda soon after it was released. The company first identified the issues most material to its business and reviewed how these aligned with the SDGs, finding that its efforts align most closely with the goals on quality education, gender equality, clean water and sanitation, decent work and economic growth, responsible consumption and production and climate action.

Gap Inc. formally incorporated these six SDGs into its sustainability strategy in 2016. By 2018, all of its brands (including Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy and Athleta) had established executive sustainability steering committees, defined their own priorities and led sustainability strategy workshops with cross-functional teams.

"The best advice we could give is to work closely with partners across the company to understand how their work is affected by the Sustainable Development Goals and lay a foundation for working together," said Diana Rosenberg, product sustainability manager at Gap Inc. "Then, it is critical to set jointly-held company goals and develop internal metrics that we can use to promote progress and hold ourselves accountable."

2. Leveraging spheres of influence

While each SDG is important, it is likely that some SDGs will resonate more strongly with a company’s business competencies and priorities. Leading companies double-down on their priority SDGs and partner with other organizations to deliver on them.

Diversity brings different perspectives to the table, and leading brands see the advantage of partnering within their own supply chain, particularly when tackling complex sustainability challenges in sourcing regions They also keep in mind that the 17 goals are interconnected, and a holistic approach is important to ensure that progress towards certain SDGs has a positive, not detrimental, effect on the others.

3. Partner for change

The SDGs are shared goals, so forming collaborations within and between sectors and industries is essential if we are to achieve them. Engaging others with your efforts will raise visibility for the Global Goals and inspire others to take action against them. Companies leading the charge not only partner with others, but also initiate the kinds of working groups, coalitions and platforms that inspire collective engagement and can scale impact.

Material change in action: Sports brand PUMA began efforts to combat the effects of climate change over a decade ago. When it was approached by U.N. Climate to engage in an initiative for the fashion industry, it naturally chose to get involved. PUMA since has worked with multiple stakeholders to develop the Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action, a framework that helps brands jointly address the climate challenge by preparing and executing their sustainability strategies in line with other players.

"Industry collaborations are catalysts for systemic change," said Stefan Seidel, head of corporate sustainability at PUMA. "When we talk about sustainability, brands often have similar goals but to a certain extent, limited resources and limited reach in shared supply chains. Sharing commitments and resources, brands have more chances to make a positive impact. We are only a small company compared to the size of the overall industry, that is why we know how important it is to work together on sustainability."

Originally published on GreenBiz (January, 2020). You can read more here.

Most people now accept that business has a critical role to play in driving positive social change and attaining the ambitious targets of the Sustainable Development Goals. As the primary framework to connect business strategies and operations with development priorities, companies can leverage the SDGs to capitalize on new business opportunities, create jobs, and make positive and demonstrable social and environmental contributions around the world. But because the business and development worlds seldom operate at the same tempo or with the same goals, corporate leaders must go the extra mile to meaningfully engage with the SDGs.

To understand these dynamics, Devex partnered with Verizon to conduct two complementary surveys: an online survey of over 850 experienced global development professionals and an in-depth interview survey of 30 corporate and development leaders. This report outlines a few practical steps corporate leaders can take to align their companies with the SDGs and accelerate their sustainability and social impact commitments while maintaining profitability.

Originally published on DEVEX newsletter (January, 2020). You can read more here.

A newly released report by IOE and Deloitte confirms that global efforts to meet Sustainable Development Goal 8 targets are lagging. IOE President Erol Kiresepi offers his views on how to scale up corporate action.

The International Organisation of Employers (IOE) and Deloitte deliver a somber assessment on global progress towards meeting Sustainable Development Goal 8 (SDG) in a joint report entitled, Reaching SDG 8: Challenges, Opportunities, Actions.

SDG 8 calls for promoting 'sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all'. According to some experts, the success of the entire SDG agenda depends to a large extent on achieving SDG 8.

Based on extensive statistical research, the report focuses on 36 countries, including the G20 countries and a selection of developing and least developed outside of the G20.

It sums up the current situation this way: “Unless all countries rethink and re-strategize their economic and social policies soon and commit to achieving these goals by incorporating them in their regional policies, the path from the vision to reality within the timeline seems increasingly difficult.”

What is going wrong?

In terms of human development over the last five years, considerable positive progress has been made as documented by the World Bank and others.  

Despite the gains, and the fact that per capita income levels have narrowed between high-and lower-income countries over the past decade and labor productivity has marginally improved in the latter, very little success has been achieved on most of the SDG 8 targets. Among the areas where we have made little headway: increasing employment opportunities, especially for the young workforce; reducing informal employment, labor market inequality, and gender discrimination; improving resource efficiency in consumption; promoting safe and secure working environments; and improving access to financial services.

These developments are necessary for sustained and inclusive economic growth.

So why is progress so sluggish? Our report is clear that the primary reason for the slow and unequal pace of advancement in achieving SDG 8 across countries is the inability of policymakers to integrate this shared agenda and vision into national development plans and strategies. In other words, governments and businesses are struggling to translate the aspirations of the SDGS into realistic and concrete plans of action.

Step up or fail

The global community has just over a decade to ratchet up action or run the risk of failing to achieve this ambitious development agenda with devastating consequences.

This scaling up must include increased engagement by the private sector on SDGs. The private sector employs 9 out of 10 people globally and provides the goods and services that form the global economy. The future of business depends on greater commitment from companies as sustainable development fosters sustainable enterprises.

How do we move forward? To bridge the gap between the aspirational and actions on the ground, employer and business member organisations can play a pivotal role. Employer organisations worldwide have long and deep experience in translating development agendas into corporate strategies and frameworks.

Based upon the surveys done for the report, there are five main actions that business federations already offer and can expand to support their member communities in integrating these global goals into local strategies:  

1. Drive change by raising awareness:  Run innovative digital campaigns on SDG 8 that engage small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). SMEs make up the largest segment of the business sector. These campaigns aspire to highlight the transformational impact of putting SDG 8 at the heart of corporate and economic growth strategies. They also offer concrete opportunities for both governments and business to share experiences both good and bad as well as toolkits on how even the smallest of projects can bring about big change.

2. Organise town halls: Bring together the corporate community with public institutions at local, national and UN level in a town hall setting. There is no better way to increase understanding than by direct dialogue.

3. Lobby government: Reach out to legislators working on national SDG 8 strategies and work with them to ensure they include conducive business environments as part of the goal.

4. Train, train and train:  Provide workshops on the basics of SDGs and how to apply them to your business

5. Get focused: It is easy to get overwhelmed by the number and scope of SDGs especially for SMEs that need to get through the next business cycle. To alleviate businesses already pushed to the limit, employer federations can help them prioritise and focus on the SDGs most relevant to their business, rather than trying to address them all - which can be overwhelming to say the least.

If there are any lingering doubts about the urgency of the need to scale up our action, just try to imagine what the world may be like if we do nothing.

If genuine progress is to be made on SDG 8 targets, the UN and employers and business federations must do more together to help businesses understand and apply SDGs.

Employer organisations can be the key to unlocking the private sector’s resources to support, and even lead on, achieving the goals.

Originally posted on July 17 through IOE. Read more here.

On July 10, Business and Industry will be holding a side event on the margins of the UN High-Level Political Forum. The event will be held from 1:15 – 2:45pm at UN HQ, Conference Room F.

The focus of this event will be a review on SDG 4, 8, 10, 13, 16, 17, in alignment with the 2019 HLPF. Opening comments will be led by Lise Kingo, UN Global Compact, and Tomasz Chruszczow, High Level Champion for UNFCCC. Moderators include Shea Gopal, IOE, and Norine Kennedy, USCIB. The event will feature many speakers across various organizations that are working to achieve the SDGs, including ICC, IOE, Dairy Farmers of America, Ernst & Young Azerbaijan, and more

View the invitation below for more information.

HelloScience is hosting a Live Lab in Bangalore on February 27 and 28, 2019, with the purpose to develop solutions addressing water purification, waste water, and water contamination. Applications are open to entrepreneurs and startups with innovative ideas and a collaborative mindset.

This opportunity will let applicants meet and work together with experts and change makers including engineers, scientists, and business developers. After showcasing solutions, individuals will receive direct one-on-one feedback from design, business, and tech development experts. Certain individuals will be able to launch their startup with a co-development partnership with either Grundfos or Novozymes. They may also receive a micro grant among other offers.

The experts working with HelloScience brings vast experience in working with global water challenges and developing solutions. At the live lab, individuals will work alongside local and global partners and experts to develop new innovations for water issues. Event partners include; Jaaga, Novozymes, Grundfos, Climate-KIC, and C-CAMP.

HelloScience was created by Novozymes to discover new sustainable solutions to the challenges of today. The platform encourages collaboration in technology and knowledge by posting ideas for sustainable solutions, which can in turn receive advice, microgrants, partnership opportunity, and more. The free platform is open to all people that are interested in developing solutions for water including innovators, experts, students, and individuals.

Applications close on February 15. Read more and apply here.

The 24th UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of the Parties (UNFCCC COP24) began on Sunday, December 2 and will run through December 14 under the Presidency of Poland, in Katowice, Poland.  On Saturday night, the negotiating groups delivered a first round of outcomes to be taken up by the Ministers arriving for the 2nd week.  Many key business issues remain incomplete or “in brackets” in the current draft “Paris Rulebook,” intended to guide putting the Paris Agreement into action.  For the week ahead, high level government representatives will be seeking “landing zones” to resolve remaining substantial divisions.

Over 30,000 are in attendance here, including USCIB members Arkema, Chevron, Mars, Novozymes and Salesforce, joining USCIB staff Norine Kennedy and Mia Lauter in tracking the complex discussions, meeting with U.S. and other government delegations and partnering with key business groups.  Here in Katowice, the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) serves as focal point for business, convening daily meetings to share intelligence and organizing the UNFCCC Business Day on December 6.

Sticking topics have included provision of how to treat compensation for loss and damage, financial support to developing countries for greenhouse gas reductions and technology cooperation, the design of elements relating to carbon markets and different rules and practices that would apply to developing and developed countries. Delegates are talking about the IPCC1.5 Special Report, worrying increases in greenhouse gas emissions and tensions in France sparked by the proposed fuel tax, since rescinded by the Government of France.

COP24 is to finalize a so-called Paris Rulebook, which will provide implementation guidance on how countries put the Paris Agreement into action.

“So far, negotiations have proceeded predictably, albeit too slowly to conclude in time,” observed Kennedy, who leads USCIB policy work on the environment and climate change. “The complexity of technical and political issues obscures the real challenge: mobilizing private sector investment and innovation at a pace and scale that would advance the UNFCCC and Paris objectives.”

According to Kennedy, the general feeling among delegates is that a fair amount of political will, particularly among high-level representatives and Ministers of Environment, will be required in order to successfully conclude.

“There is no one issue that is dominating conversations,” added Kennedy. “Rather, the sheer number of issues to be negotiated and the level of technicality those issues present is daunting for Parties to manage (or business representatives to track).”

The smaller than usual U.S. delegation here is led by Trigg Talley, and includes other State Department, Energy and EPA representatives.  Next week, Assistant Secretary of State Judy Garber and Wells Griffith (White House) arrive for the high-level portion of the negotiations.

Crucial to business will be outcomes on carbon markets. Countries seem to be falling into one of two camps:

• The view of the U.S. is that any exchange – known as an ITMO (internationally transferred mitigation outcome) – should remain between the countries undertaking the transaction, and that both countries would agree their accounting and other arrangements accordingly.

• Other parties take the view that ITMO approval should come through a centralized UNFCCC body, and that some share of the transactions (“a share of the proceeds”) should be allocated to a central fund or other UNFCCC-determined purpose.

Also crucial to business will be the potential adoption of the Silesian Declaration on Just Transition proposed by the Polish Presidency. Many parties support the Declaration, but others feel that they haven’t had enough time to examine the proposal.

“We are flagging the number of climate topics that are spilling into other forums and key issues, such as human rights and trade,” said Kennedy. “Following discussions with the U.S. Delegation here, USCIB has asked the State Department to stand firm against any intention to use participation in the Paris Agreement as a litmus test for trade policies among nations.”

Kennedy also observed that protesters and some social media accounts continue to complain about the presence of business at COP24, asserting that their involvement here constitutes a “conflict of interest” and interferes with the ability of governments to reach an ambitious agreement.  In the week ahead, USCIB members and staff will continue to express U.S. business priorities, working closely with the Administration to promote energy innovation and advance substantive business engagement.

Read more here.

With the future of food continuing to be a pressing global challenge and malnutrition profoundly affecting every country, The USCIB Foundation once again teamed up with the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) to organize a public-private partnerships dialogue to tackle malnutrition. The November 8-9 dialogue in Rome, Italy was a second in a series and was built on last year’s event in New York. USCIB CEO and President Peter Robinson participated in the event alongside Vice President for Product Policy and Innovation Mike Michener. Robinson spoke at the opening session and took part in a fireside chat conversation with GAIN Executive Director Lawrence Haddad, who is the winner of the 2018 World Food Prize.

This year’s event featured the theme of “Together for Nutrition: applying principles for public-private engagement.” The high-level dialogue explored practical and tangible ways to implement and scale coordinated initiatives to put the draft Principles, that were agreed upon last year, into practice. The program focused on both under-nutrition and the rise of overweight and obesity, as well as the associated diet related non-communicable diseases. Leaders of governments, development agencies, and the private sector from a wide range of countries, with a particular focus on developing countries with high burdens of malnutrition, participated in the dialogue.

This year’s event concluded with some important outcomes to help deliver results. GAIN and The USCIB Foundation are planning to take the Principles to donors such as developmental agencies, foundations, and companies interested in public-private partnerships. USCIB will also ask its member companies, with existing public-private partnerships to pilot the Principles of Engagement by applying them retroactively to the ongoing PPP. Michener, who leads USCIB’s work on food and healthcare, also emphasized the importance of engaging the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

“We [GAIN and USCIB] will take the Principles to the Rome-based agencies, starting with a briefing for Permanent Representatives early in 2019, followed by the FAO Program Committee and the Executive Boards of WFP and IFAD,” he said. “We also plan to take the Principles to regional meetings, with the first meeting tentatively set for Africa in late 2019.”

Global food and agriculture constitute a US$7.8 trillion industry, employing up to 40 percent of the working population in many countries yet progress towards the ambitious 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is too slow and the scale and complexity of the problem underscores the need for deepened collaboration and renewed commitment to improving nutrition outcomes for all, especially the most vulnerable,” according to Michener.

“Countries cannot achieve their SDG goals without an aligned, motivated and incentivized private sector as a key partner,” said Michener. “In this context, improved dialogue and collaboration between government, business, civil society and international organizations is crucial for guiding engagement and focusing efforts where they can have the most sustainable impact and long-term success.”

Originally published on USCIB here.

With the future of food continuing to be a pressing global challenge and malnutrition profoundly affecting every country, The USCIB Foundation is once again teaming up with the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) to organize a public-private partnerships dialogue to tackle malnutrition.

The November 8-9 dialogue, taking place in Rome, is a second in a series and will build on last year’s event in New York. USCIB CEO and President Peter Robinson will participate in the event alongside Vice President for Product Policy and Innovation Mike Michener. Robinson will speak at the opening session and take part in a fireside chat conversation with GAIN Executive Director Lawrence Haddad, who is the recent winner of the 2018 World Food Prize.

This year’s event will have the theme of “Together for Nutrition: applying principles for public-private engagement.” The high-level dialogue will explore practical and tangible ways to implement and scale coordinated initiatives to put the draft Principles, that were agreed upon last year, into practice. The program will focus on both under-nutrition and the rise of overweight and obesity, as well as the associated diet related non-communicable diseases.

Leaders of governments, development agencies, and the private sector from a wide range of countries, with a particular focus on developing countries with high burdens of malnutrition, will participate in the dialogue.

“Global food and agriculture constitute a US$7.8 trillion industry, employing up to 40 percent of the working population in many countries yet progress towards the ambitious 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is too slow and the scale and complexity of the problem underscores the need for deepened collaboration and renewed commitment to improving nutrition outcomes for all, especially the most vulnerable,” said Michener, who leads USCIB’s work on healthcare as well as  food and agriculture policy. “Countries cannot achieve their SDG goals without an aligned, motivated and incentivized private sector as a key partner.”

In this context, improved dialogue and collaboration between government, business, civil society and international organizations is crucial for guiding engagement and focusing efforts where they can have the most sustainable impact and long-term success.

Originally published on USCIB here.

As governments gathered in New York for the 73rd Session of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) from September 24 – 28, convened under the Presidency of Ambassador María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés(Ecuador), USCIB members highlighted the contribution and practical experience of the American private sector in advancing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

USCIB convened a side event, “Making, valuing and communicating SDG Impact: U.S. Business Signposts for the Next 5 Years.” The event was hosted by Deloitte on September 27th and gathered representatives from business, government and the UN system to share information and experiences in three areas critical to successful SDG action by businesses:

1. Embedding sustainability into the core of company’s business models

2. Measuring the impact of sustainability programs and initiatives

3. Communicating impact to target audiences and key stakeholders

In 2019, the UN will consider the first three years of experience and implementation with the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and consider possible changes.  USICB’s event made clear that, three years into the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, substantial progress has been made thanks to the commitment and action of U.S. business, but also flagged areas where stronger links with business would enhance progress towards the SDGs.

Director of the Office of Global Change at the U.S. Department of State Thomas DeBass acknowledged that business will deliver most of the funding for the SDGs, so it follows that governments and the UN must do a better job communicating to business. “Only 10 percent of the financing to achieve the SDGs will come through official development aid and related government sources,” said DeBass. “The other 90 percent will come about through private-sector investment. But we are still trying to convince the 90 percent using the language of the 10 percent.  We need to reorient our sales pitch to speak the language of business.”

Meanwhile companies recognize the business case for embedding sustainability across their operations. In fact, Novozymes’ Head of Corporate Sustainability and Public Affairs Claus Stig Pedersen noted, “we don’t have a sustainability policy, we have a business system that adjusts to sustainable development.”

Chief Strategy Officer for International Development at Deloitte Wade Warren pointed out that, “achieving the SDGs could unlock an additional $12 trillion in business opportunities.”  Yet, while business enthusiasm for the SDGs and the business opportunities that the SDGs create, is growing, the full potential of collaboration between the private sector, governments and the UN system has not been unlocked.

Norine Kennedy, USCIB vice president for environment, energy and strategic international engagement, called for a practical approach to “inclusive multilateralism” that will animate business to further develop and deploy technologies, know-how and investment to advance the Global Goals.

On September 27, the UN also held the third high-level meeting on Non-communicable Diseases (NCDs), which was attended by USCIB Vice President for Product Policy and Innovation Mike Michener. The two previous high-level sessions on NCDs took place in 2011 and 2014. The meeting on September 27th served as a comprehensive review of the prevention and control of NCDs and focused on the theme of strengthening health systems and financing for the prevention and control of NCDs, on each country’s path towards achieving universal health care, including through sharing evidence-based best practices, scientific knowledge and lessons learned.” The International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) UN Representative in New York Andrew Wilson represented the private sector. The outcome of this meeting was an adopted UN Declaration on NCDs. 

The UN General Assembly is the supreme governing body of the United Nations.  This year’s session that will continue throughout the year into spring 2019 will focuses on the theme, “Making the United Nations Relevant to All People: Global Leadership and Shared Responsibility for Peaceful, Equitable and Sustainable Societies.”

USCIB will continue to work with member companies, governments and the UN system, to share expertise and foster partnerships to continue to advance the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, including through the Businessfor2030 web platform.

Read more here.

This year’s 73rd session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) will be held at the United Nations Headquarters in New York from September 18-30. The 73rd session will host discussions around the general theme of debate: “Making the United Nations Relevant to All People: Global Leadership and Shared Responsibility for Peaceful, Equitable and Sustainable Societies.” During the opening of the 73rd session, H.E. Mrs. María Fernanda Espinosa Garcés of Ecuador, President of the 73rd Session of the UN General Assembly, laid out her priorities for the session. These include gender equality, migration and refugees, decent work, environmental action, people with disabilities, UN revitalization, and peace & security. She also spoke about the 2030 Agenda, mentioning that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are “best measured by its impact on the well-being of the world’s people”. She continued to say that the impact of the SDGs “is ultimately what makes the United Nations relevant and valuable to the world.”

To understand the impact of the SDGs on people and business, United States Council for International Business (USCIB) will be leading an event, hosted by Deloitte, on September 27. The event, Making, Valuing and Communicating SDG Impact, will seek to measure the impact of the SDGs on US business and how companies are embedding SDGs into their everyday process. During the event, the platform Business For 2030 will be highlighted as an innovative and accessible way to present specific examples and approaches to the SDGs, embedding the cases in the SDG language itself. USCIB member companies, government, and other stakeholders, will attend the event to consider how American business can make an impact in embedding SDGs in their business operation, and options to strengthen international cooperation and business engagement for the SDGs.

The General Assembly will also feature sub-events specifically focused on driving progress toward the SDGs, namely Global Goals Week and Climate Week NYC.

Global Goals Week is a week long series of events starting on September 22nd focused on making progress toward the SDGs. The week will include events such as 2018 Concordia Annual Summit, 2018 Global People’s Summit, Sustainable Development Impact Summit, Global Day of Action and more. This event presents the chance for representatives from businesses, governments, academic institutions and NGOs to engage in a variety of panel discussions, exhibitions and seminars.

Climate Week NYC will be held from September 24-30 in New York City, and is organized by The Climate Group along with the United Nations and the City of New York. Climate Week NYC will host many high-level stakeholders with the objective to create policies around climate action to combat climate change. The week will host over 160 affiliate events in a variety of formats, in hopes of creating an open dialogue to drive awareness and advance debate against climate change.

Read more about UNGA here.

Read more about UNGA events here.

As governments, international agencies, business and other stakeholders converged on New York for this year’s High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the United Nations July 9 – 18, the United States Council for International Business (USCIB) hosted a Businessfor2030 dinner on July 16. The dinner was co-organized with the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), ICC United Kingdom, ICC Switzerland and the International Organization of Employers (IOE) and brought together business, UN organizations and governments to highlight private sector action and achievements towards sustainable development, showcasing the Business for 2030 website as a partnerships resource and source of SDG business action examples.

The dinner celebrated the expansion of the Business for 2030 platform. Along with a revamped logo and homepage, the platform welcomed three new content partners—ICC United Kingdom, ICC Switzerland and IOE. These new partners aided in kickstarting the “internationalization” of the platform through the inclusion of case studies that showcase how private sector entities around the globe are working to deliver the UN Global Goals. USCIB is excited to have new content partners that share the Businessfor2030 vision of diversity and partnership as a resource to advance SDG implementation. The new partners feel the same way:  

We are excited about working with the Businessfor2030 initiative to showcase the important role that the private sector plays in supporting the SDGs, and use it as a platform to promote good corporate governance. – ICC UK

Partnerships are key for reaching the SDGs. Neither companies, nor governments or civil society can afford to work in silos anymore. Companies need to work together and with stakeholders like governments and affected communities to address systemic challenges that one player will not be able to address systematically alone. I am looking forward to connecting the dots through this cooperation and facilitating partnerships for a better implementation of the SDGs. – IOE President Erol Kiresepi

The UN SDGs are a unique reference system to work for a more sustainable world. ICC Switzerland is enthusiastic to showcase the contributions of Swiss companies to these activities. Such examples strengthen the trust in business to actively cooperate. – ICC CH

The push to internationalize the Business for 2030 website coincides with strong business commitment to advance the SDGs around the world. Speaking at the dinner, new Secretary General of ICC John Denton issued a challenge to the international community to unleash business resources and knowhow to attain the 2030 objectives across economic, social and environmental areas.  “We need to help people understand the power of working with the private sector,” emphasized Denton.  Kris DeMeester, representing the International Organization of Employers, underscored the broad commitment of employers all over the world to advance sustainable development through employment, in the workplace and working closely with other social partners.

“Three years after the launch of the SDGs, we continue to take seriously that all companies, all sectors must engage to deliver on economic, environmental and social progress,” stated USCIB President and CEO Peter Robinson in his opening remarks. “No company can sit this out.  We commend our own members for having embraced the SDGs and moved forward to embed them not only in corporate responsibility programs, but increasingly across aspects of their planning and investment.”

Partnerships are key to achieving the SDGs and the Business for 2030 platform is a strong example of this. By working together with multiple organizations, the platform aims to expand and increase business action for the SDG around the world while showcasing to the UN and public sector what business has done for the Global Goals.

The three new partners join Businessfor2030 content partners ICC, Business Call to Action (BCtA), The Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) and the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations (IFPMA).

The Business for 2030 website may be hosted by the United States Council for International Business, but it is an initiative of more and more businesses around the world in their efforts to achieve the SDGs.

This year’s United Nations High-Level Political Forum (UN HLPF) on sustainable development will be held from July 9-18 under the auspices of the Economic and Social Council. The theme for the forum will be “Transformation towards sustainable and resilient societies” focusing in part on Sustainable Development Goal 15: Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss Goal 17: Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development, that will be considered each year.

As part of USCIB’s countdown to the UN HLPF, USCIB is highlighting some initiatives that its member companies are working on to transform toward sustainable and resilient societies, while subsequently meeting the SDG targets set by the UN. More examples of initiatives can be found on USCIB’s Business for 2030 website.

SDG 15: Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss

One initiative to highlight is a project by Novozymes to support the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CDB) in terms of the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic resources.  Novozymes has decided to acknowledge and support the principles of both the CBD and the Nagoya protocol and has internal procedures to ensure that it lives up to its commitments. Novozymes promotes fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from the utilization of genetic resources and promotes appropriate access to such resources, as internationally agreed. They are regularly assessing outcomes of CBD meetings with a view to undertake a broader strategic discussion on its management and reporting of biodiversity issues. By sharing the benefits of genetic resources, Novozymes is taking steps to achieve SDG 15 and to increase biological diversity.

SDG 17: Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development, that will be considered each year

Another project to note is an initiative by Mars to ensure that everyone working with their extended supply chains should earn sufficient income to maintain a decent standard of living. This is done through Mars’ Farmer Income Lab, an open-source “think-do-tank” that will enable Mars and others to leverage their unique human, social and financial resources to identify and activate solutions needed to eradicate smallholder poverty in global supply chains. This year, the Lab’s focus is on identifying effective actions that buyers can take to enable smallholder farmers in global supply chains to meaningfully increase income. This will culminate in a ‘What Works’ publication, providing an overview of promising models, sourced from academic literature and stakeholder dialogues, that increase incomes and demonstrate what factors are most successful. Mars’ commitment to increasing incomes is part of their Sustainable in a Generation Plan, a $1-billion investment to accelerate sustainable growth by achieving SDG 17 through global partnerships.

Click here for more information on what USCIB has done so far during this year’s HLPF.

This year’s United Nations High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) on sustainable development is being held July 9-18 under the auspices of the UN Economic and Social Council. The theme for the forum is “Transformation towards sustainable and resilient societies,” focusing in part on Sustainable Development Goal 11: Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable, and Sustainable Development Goal 12: Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.

As part of USCIB’s countdown to the HLPF, we are highlighting some initiatives our member companies are working on to transform toward sustainable and resilient societies, while subsequently meeting the SDG targets set by the UN. More examples of initiatives can be found on USCIB’s Business for 2030 website.

SDG 11: Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable

A notable project is one initiative by Novozymes to manage and treat solid waste and wastewater for cities. In a partnership with DONG Energy in the UK, Novozymes is incorporating special enzymes into a waste management plant in England. This will ensure that most of the waste from 110,000 UK homes is recycled into biogas, plastic, metal, and fuel. Most importantly, the biogas can be converted into green power and used to generate 5MW of electricity to power 9,500 households. The project will help aid cities to be more productive with their waste management, to be more sustainable overall, and to help achieve SDG 11.

SDG 12: Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns

Cargill is working with several partners to achieve SDG 12 to eliminate food loss and ensure global food security. Cargill addresses hunger, food waste, food security, and other issues in 18 countries by working with national food banks. They also participate in Food Reform for Sustainability and Health (FReSH) initiative, led by EAT and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, which brings together business and science to help accelerate progress across the value chain for global food systems. Furthermore, Cargill is working with World Resources Institute to create and deploy an accounting system toolkit to reduce food loss and waste by setting reduction targets, creating measurement and reporting processes, and creating internal and external awareness.

Next week, we will highlight company initiatives on Goal 15: Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss; and Goal 17: Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development.

This year’s United Nations High-Level Political Forum (UN HLPF) on sustainable development will be held from July 9-18 in New York under the auspices of the Economic and Social Council. The theme for the forum will be “Transformation towards sustainable and resilient societies” focusing in part on Sustainable Development Goal 6: Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all, and Sustainable Development Goal 7: Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.

As part of USCIB’s countdown to the UN HLPF, USCIB is highlighting select initiatives by its member companies. In particular, USCIB is selecting some company initiatives that are working to transform toward sustainable and resilient societies, while subsequently meeting the SDG targets set by the UN. A more comprehensive list of examples can be found on USCIB’s Business for 2030 website.

SDG 6: Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all

One impactful project to note is an initiative by Monsanto that led to the development of a well for clean drinking water in Malawi. A team from Monsanto Malawi discovered that students at Kaphulika Primary School near Lilongwe had a commute of two miles to the closest water source, and therefore limiting drinking water and hygiene water at the school. The team subsequently constructed a water pump on school grounds to provide clean and reliable drinking water for over 950 children and the village of 3,000 people. The children were also gifted with reusable water bottles to take water home every day after school. The development of the well is another step forward for Monsanto to help achieve SDG 6 for Malawi and the world.

SDG 7: Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all

In order to achieve SDG 7 to ensure renewable energy around the world, Mars has added solar panels to factories in California and aims to create renewable infrastructure in the U.S. and the UK. By the end of 2018, Mars will be using or purchasing renewable electricity to cover 100% of its operations in 11 countries. The use of renewable energy will help Mars reach its goal in reducing GHG emissions 100% by 2040 from direct operations and will help drive action for global climate change.

Tune in for next week when we will highlight company initiatives on Goal 11: make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable, and Goal 12: ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.

As governments and stakeholders gathered for the third annual United Nations Multi-stakeholder Forum on Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) for the SDGs in New York on June 5-6, USCIB organized a timely breakfast roundtable on the margins of the forum titled, “Together for Impact: Business Innovation for the SDGs” on June 6. USCIB partnered with the U.S. Department of State and the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) to launch a practical and productive dialogue between USCIB member companies and UN missions and agencies.

The roundtable – held at Pfizer’s Headquarters in New York – brought together UN Missions, UN Agencies, and USCIB Member companies to discuss opportunities to partner and scale up the deployment of business innovation in order to deliver progress on the SDGs.  Representatives of companies, governments and the UN system began a practical dialogue on operationalizing private sector innovations through conducive enabling regulatory frameworks and inclusive international cooperation.

Monsanto, Ferrero, Pfizer, Novozymes, LexisNexis and CropLife International presented examples of how the private sector is working with other stakeholders to advance innovative technologies and knowledge-sharing.  Japanese Ambassador and Co-Chair of the STI Forum Toshiya Hoshino gave a government and UN perspective, as did Judith Arrieta, on behalf of Ambassador Juan Sandoval Mendiolea of Mexico, co-chair of STI Forum.  Also attending the meeting were the co-chairs and several members of the UN “10 Member Advisory Group” to the STI Forum, including Dr. Vaughan Turekian of the National Academy of Sciences.

U.S. Ambassador to the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Kelley Currie opened the meeting, highlighting the importance of bringing the private sector, that is increasingly embracing and operationalizing SDG-related innovations – in terms of products, services, ways of producing, and the means of cooperation itself – into partnership with the UN system.  In her keynote speech, she stated that, “there are such good intentions on all sides, and a great deal of achievement and potential to offer.  Three years after 2015, Addis and New York and Paris, those who understand the imperative of stepped up deployment of solutions do need to find ways to advance those opportunities, to bridge what appear to be missed opportunities and take them forward for shared impact and benefit.  Business too has to do more to encourage such a “skin in the game” working relationships, including through public-private partnerships.”

USCIB President and CEO Peter Robinson remarked, “dissemination and deployment of technologies and know-how for the widest possible societal benefits are imperatives that can only be advanced by working together with the US business community.  That is why USCIB called this meeting, for systems thinking and more importantly systems doing,  and to cultivate systemic collaboration and knowledge-sharing.”

In concluding the meeting, Andrew Wilson, ICC’s Permanent Representative to the UN in New York, brought the discussion back to the fundamental question of where governments and the multilateral system need private sector involvement most.  “Clearly we need more interactions like this one to determine solutions from business that can be widely deployed to help advance the SDGs.”

USCIB and its members will continue to work with governments to ensure that business views and contributions to innovation for the SDGs in the form of products, initiatives and implementation are heard, welcomed, and taken into account at important meetings like the UN High Level Political Forum (UN HLPF) as well as at future UN STI sessions.

The third annual SDG Business Forum will be held at the United Nations Headquarters on July 17, 2018 during the ministerial segment of the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF). The SDG Business Forum is hosted by the International Chamber of Commerce, the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA), and the UN Global Compact. Leaders from business, government, UN agencies, key international organizations, and civil society groups will attend the Forum to explore and foster business engagement in implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the 2030 Agenda.

The UN 2030 Agenda is a platform for the private sector to demonstrate the central role of business in sustainable development from the standpoints of investment, innovation and implementation. The HLPF will be convened under the Economic and Social Council as the central UN forum to review the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals. This year’s theme for the HLPF is “Transformation towards sustainable and resilient societies.” The meetings will focus on six of the 17 SDGs; including Goal 6 – Ensure Water & Sanitation, Goal 7 – Ensure Energy for All, Goal 11 – Make Cities Sustainable, Goal 12 – Ensure Sustainable Consumption & Production, Goal 15 – Protect Ecosystems, and Goal 17 – Strengthen Means of Implementation. The SDG Business Forum will showcase and report on how businesses of all sectors and nationalities are engaged in supporting those six SDGs.

The SDG Business Forum is a unique multi-stakeholder platform for business action and partnerships to achieve the SDGs by fostering public-private dialogues, catalyzing new partnerships and alliances, and exploring innovative business solutions to accelerate sustainable development. From SMEs to multi-national companies, businesses are realizing the necessity of incorporating the SDGs into their business plans and practices and the Business Forum provides the opportunity to review and strengthen their engagement in the SDGS.

The SDG Business Forum will be held from 9:15 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. on July 17, 2018 at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City.

Register for the SDG Business Forum here.

Read more about the HLPF here.

Wilton Park USA, in partnership with the USCIB Foundation and the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), has published a report as follow up to last October’s successful joint dialogue on “No More Missed Opportunities: Advancing Public-Private Partnerships to Achieve the Global Nutrition Goals.” The report summarizes the details of the meeting as well as the “Principles of Engagement,” which were developed during the meeting to provide a useful framework through which to approach future public-private partnership and a valuable reference point for developing effective solutions.

The report concludes that “effective partnerships and better nutrition outcomes can be facilitated through policy and legislative frameworks more conducive to collaboration. This could include better application of the clout of financiers, shareholders, and consumers on the business side and constituencies, NGOs, and civil servants on the government side.”

“Every country is now struggling with some aspect of malnutrition, and a growing number are experiencing both undernutrition and obesity,” said USCIB Vice President for Product Policy and Innovation Mike Michener, who leads USCIB’s policy work on nutrition, food and health. “The roundtable sought to support the accelerated achievement of internationally agreed global nutrition goals, and broader commitment to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), by convening a high-level group of leaders from government, business and other key stakeholders.”

This meeting aimed to tackle the problem of poor diet as the number one risk factor for early death, contributing to 20 percent of global deaths, with the burden falling disproportionately on children under five and women of reproductive age, a situation nutrition experts have described as a “missed opportunity” (Lancet, 2013). Each year, malnutrition is a factor in almost half of the six million deaths of children under five, and 159 million children are stunted, with impacts on their physical and cognitive abilities that last a lifetime. More than 500 million women are anemic, with an increased risk of maternal death and delivering premature and low-birth-weight babies. At the same time, 600 million adults are obese, and 420 million have diabetes, with rates rising steeply.

Read the full report here.

As 2030 approaches, many companies are creating innovative ways to track progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), while others are encouraging the transformation of the SDGs from a corporate social responsibility sector to an integral business process which can impact savings and returns.

Bechtel Corporation has gone a step further by developing a textual analytics framework to use data and metrics that can advance the business case for the SDGs. This framework would help a company transform their SDG practices from their corporate social responsibility and public relations departments into an instrumental aspect of their business practices.

Bechtel’s Global Head of Sustainability Tam Nguyen and his colleague Michael Yamoah, manager of sustainability insights and analytics, have recently written an article in EnvironmentGuru in which they present a case study highlighting the framework process using textual analytics to match business indicators with voluntary national review indicators to highlight different areas for potential project opportunities and risks related to the SDGs. The article goes into detail about the case study by discussing the challenge and approach and noted four key steps to developing the business case for the SDGs.

The new article follows an earlier blog post on June 20, 2017 about Bechtel’s approach to using metrics to advance the SDGs. The blog post focused on how using metrics to study the relationship between the SDGs and corporations would encourage innovation in business to effectively merge the SDGs into business practices.

During last year’s UN General Assembly (UNGA), USCIB organized a  Business Experts Roundtable on Data Analytics for SDGs. At the event, Bechtel presented this framework to encourage companies to shift from SDG reporting to developing a business strategy that consolidates SDGs into the entire business process. 

Bechtel’s innovative framework can help other companies achieve the SDGs and help to push the 2030 agenda forward for all people. The framework can allow businesses to help their bottom line by impacting their savings or returns through further innovation with the SDGs. Encouraging companies to adopt the SDGs into their business practices is not just good for all, but also good business.

Read more on the case study in the original article here.

Around the world this week, governments, multilaterals, and companies are coming together to celebrate Financial Inclusion Week. It’s an opportunity to reflect on the progress that we’ve made in extending financial access to un-banked and underbanked communities, and also a time to take honest stock of how far we still have to go. As Mastercard’s Chief Product Officer Michael Miebach noted following his speech at Money20/20 last week – we’re making progress, but at our current pace we won’t achieve full financial inclusion for another 200 years. Needless to say, we’ve got work to do.

The theme of this year’s Financial Inclusion Week is how new products and partnerships can enable financial inclusion. At Mastercard, this topic is close to our hearts. We believe that cross-sector partnerships are key to extending access to consumers at the base of the pyramid and building products that truly improve their lives.

To be clear, promoting inclusion is not corporate social responsibility for us. Not only is pushing for a world where everyone has access to the security, transparency, and control of digital payments the right thing to do, but it’s also critical to the future of business.

We’re proud that this commitment to new partnership models can be found at all levels of our company. Several of these partnerships have been highlighted in a joint report by Accion’s Center for Financial Inclusion and the Institute for International Finance, entitled “How Financial Institutions and Fintechs are Partnering for Inclusion: Lessons from the Frontlines”. The report recognizes our collaboration with Kopo Kopo, a fintech start-up, and Diamond Trust Bank to create a QR-payment ecosystem in Kenya that allows customers to pay with their phones, by simply taking a photo of a QR code and manually entering the transaction amount.

Later this week, I’ll be speaking about ways financial institutions and fintechs can partner during a webinar hosted by the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion.

Beyond our partnerships, we’ve done our own on-the-ground research. For example, we recently released a report that offer insights into how to build a digital payments ecosystem for small and micro businesses. To learn more about how we’re supporting financial inclusion across the company, watch this video.

Despite these gains, we still face a host of challenges in reaching the two billion people who are locked out of the formal financial system. At Mastercard, we know that the only way we will ever transform this equation is by creating partnerships that leverage relevant sector expertise, and that offer in-depth knowledge of base-of-the-pyramid needs – from health and education, to payments and digital finance.

It is perhaps the biggest ecosystem we have tried to build yet, but it is incumbent on all of us to do so. 200 years is too long to wait.

Read the original post on LinkedIn here.

Want to change the world? Allow the private sector to do what it does best. 

For the past week, the world has watched as heads of state and global business leaders convened in New York City for the 72nd United Nations General Assembly. The agenda was far from light. Topics ranged from food security to climate change to the refugee crisis to healthcare. The task at hand – achieving the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030 – is a daunting one and it’s become widely understood that the private sector has a critical role to play in ensuring those goals are reached.

But the public and private sectors are also beginning to recognize that philanthropic dollars alone will not get us there. More and more corporate philanthropy is being viewed as a catalyst for action that connects back to longer-term business objectives.

This principle of doing well and doing good is not new, but it’s especially important for the private sector, maybe now more than ever. At Mastercard, we don’t see the two concepts as mutually exclusive. Rather, we believe companies can deliver on their business objectives and have a positive impact on the world around them. In fact, it’s a must to do both.

Last week at UNGA, my colleagues and I were at the forefront driving conversations to help accelerate progress around these problems which threaten to overwhelm our society. We announced a partnership with PEPFAR to use technology to help fight HIV/AIDS, we led discussions on the future of the workforce, gender equality, and humanitarian finance, and our CEO Ajay Banga spoke about the need to align core capabilities with the SDGs.

Throughout these discussions, we had a common refrain: engage the private sector to do what it does best. When this expertise is applied to societal challenges, we are able to do so much more to improve the lives of those who suffer most.

For Mastercard, this means using our technology, data, expertise and investments to build successful business models. When we take this approach with our partners, we can build high-impact solutions that are scalable for them and sustainable for us. For example, we have helped make it faster, safer and more efficient for NGOs to deliver humanitarian aid through the products like the Mastercard Aid Network and Mastercard Send. And we developed 2Kuze, a mobile marketplace that addresses the needs of small farmers by providing a way for them to efficiently and transparently run their businesses.

We know this strategy works and that’s one of the reasons we signed onto the United Nations Global Compact, which calls on companies to align their strategies with societal goals. As the first company in the payments industry to sign onto the Global Compact, we see this as an integral step in our efforts to do well as a company and do good for society.

Our commitments didn’t stop there. We also joined Business Call to Action (BCtA), which challenges companies to develop inclusive business models to reach the billions of people trapped in poverty. We are already more than half-way to our goal of connecting 500 million people to financial services by 2020 and reaching 40 million micro- and small merchants by 2022.

It’s great progress, but there’s still much work to be done. I read the other day that there are less than 5,000 days until December 31, 2030 – the UN’s deadline for achieving the SDGs. To some that may seem like a long time, to others not so much. At Mastercard, we see it as 5,000 opportunities to come to work and say, “What can we do to help change the world today?” Our CEO calls it bringing your heart and mind to work. It’s important because these issues impact us all and we all have a role to play in solving them. So, how can we work with your organization to help change the world today? Every little bit counts.

Read the original post on LinkedIn here. 

At the United Nations General Assembly in September, the Global Alliance for Reporting on Peaceful, Just, and Inclusive Societies hosted an event titled Better Business for a Better World. It was held at the law firm White&Case and moderated by award-winning NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff—over 150 people from the private sector, the United Nations, and civil society were present, and the theme was how the private sector can engage with Goal 16 of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): promote just, peaceful, and inclusive societies.

Goal 16 offers a new paradigm for peace and development and is a critical component to the rest of the SDGs. The preamble of the SDGs declares, “we are determined to foster peaceful, just and inclusive societies which are free from fear and violence. There can be no sustainable development without peace and no peace without sustainable development.” Goal 16 is also important for private sector engagement in the SDGs, and has been described by one company as “foundational to achieving the other UN Sustainable Development Goals.”

Why SDG 16 is Critical to the Private Sector

The United Nations Global Compact lays out a framework for Goal 16 that focuses on three interconnected challenges to businesses (corruption, violent conflict, and weak rule of law) and describes the necessity of anti-corruption, peacebuilding, and rule of law efforts to create an environment where business can thrive. This was a common theme at the Better Business for a Better World event—a representative from the RELX Group at the event noted, “when rule of law is strong, business and society flourishes,” a sentiment echoed by several other private sector companies.

Many businesses have come out strongly in support of the SDGs, but Goal 16 often isn’t the most popular—a survey of over 2,000 sustainable business professionals revealed that climate action (SDG 13) was the most supported goal among corporate and brand respondents, followed by SDG 8 (decent work and economic growth), and SDG 12 (responsible consumption and production). Some private sector actors believe that SDG 16 is purely the mandate of nonprofits and government: a report on the SDGs by The Fletcher School supported with a grant from Citigroup posits, “some goals, such as SDG 16 (Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions), are enablers for which much of the onus must fall on noncorporate actors.”

Some businesses have taken a different view, and see themselves as key actors in achieving Goal 16. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) notes that “just, peaceful and inclusive societies provide a firm foundation for business to thrive” and technology firm SAP explains on their SDG webpage that business can often exacerbate conflict and therefore must play a central role in creating peace. The CEO Guide the to the SDGs highlights that the SDGs provide an opportunity to gain society’s trust and establish new opportunities for positive engagement, and supporting peace and justice is a great place to start. A year ago, the International Peace Institute hosted an event on why Goal 16 is good for business that highlighted several ways that the private sector can promote peace, justice, and inclusive societies.

How Can the Private Sector Build Peaceful, Just, and Inclusive Societies?

Peace, justice, and inclusion are undoubtedly good for business, but how can businesses play a positive role in promoting these values via the SDG framework? The United Nations Global Compact described a few ways the private sector can engage with Goal 16 in a report from 2015: at the micro level, corporate responsibility initiatives can play a role in increasing the transparency, accountability, and inclusivity of a company’s operations. At the macro level, businesses can champion the rule of law, human rights, labor rights, environmental issues, and anti-corruption initiatives.

The private sector has its own view of how business can contribute to Goal 16. Business for 2030 provides examples on companies working on each of the Global Goals, explains how the private sector can work on the Goals, and provides partnership resources. The SDG Industry Matrix contains several case studies on businesses from seven sectors working on SDG 16, as well as opportunities for shared value through collaboration. One great resource is a guide from the UN Global Compact and KPMG on Responsible Business Advancing Peace. Private sector tools such as the SDG Business Hub, the SDG Compass, and the SDG Selector can help businesses think critically about how to engage Global Goals— for Goal 16, they note that businesses should implement conflict-sensitive policies and practices, conduct risk and impact assessments to identify and mitigate risks of contributing to corruption, violence, and conflict, and engage in public-private dialogues, partnerships and collective action for conflict prevention, peacekeeping, peacebuilding, anti-corruption, and the rule of law.

What these tools do not provide, however, are suggestions for where businesses can turn if they want to engage specifically on Goal 16—if a company wants to engage in partnerships around peacebuilding, anti-corruption, or rule of law to advance Goal 16, how do they begin? One place is the United Nations Business for Peace network, a platform of close to 150 leading companies and business associations from 37 countries dedicated to catalyzing collaborative action to advance peace. The UN provides guidance for companies working in conflict, as well as how business can advance sustainable development by supporting peace. Another good focal point is the Alliance for Peacebuilding, a global network of over 100 organizations and 15,000 people working to advance sustainable peace and security worldwide. The Alliance can help companies partner with civil society organizations working on peacebuilding around the world, turning a Global Goal into an actionable project at the local level.

From Global to Local: Partnerships for Peace

While most conversations about the private sector working on the SDGs have focused on large, multi-national corporations, it’s important to remember that the majority of business consists of micro, small, or medium size firms operating in their local communities. The same is true for the sustainable development—while large non-profits and inter-government entities work on the Sustainable Development Goals, all development efforts are ultimately a local affair.

Given this fact, it’s important that businesses working on Goal 16 work with local private sector companies, local civil society organizations, and local governments on issues related to Goal 16. The key to building a durable peace lies in collaboration—no one company, non-profit, or government can reduce conflict, eliminate corruption, or build inclusive societies. For Goal 16, it’s critical that businesses (and governments) work with local non-profits—this was highlighted by the Executive Director of the African Centre for Justice and Peace Studies at the Better Business for a Better World event, who said that companies can work on peace, but only if they work with civil society. Fortunately there are resources on how to engage with civil society on the SDGs—one article describes how civil society can work effectively with the private sector on the SDGs, and International Alert (a leading civil society peacebuilding organization) makes similar suggestions with regard to Goal 16 in particular.

As an article from Corporate Citizen notes, “peaceful and inclusive societies are as much a means as an end to achieving all the other goals. The herculean nature of this task means that it has to be all hands-on deck – including governments, NGOs, businesses, and communities.” If businesses are committed to building a better world, Goal 16 is a good place to start—and if the private sector embraces this goal, the odds of achieving more peaceful, just, and inclusive societies will greatly increase.

“We live in a complex world. The United Nations cannot succeed alone. Partnership must continue to be at the heart of our strategy. We should have the humility to acknowledge the essential role of other actors, while maintaining full awareness of our unique convening power.”

-Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary General

The 72nd United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) gets under way this week at a time of stresses and strains in the international community. The nature of these stresses is particularly acute for the U.S. business community: a growing need for financing and investment in infrastructure, the open trading system called into question, and calls by some for a retreat from engagement in multilateral forums. How does American business plan for these challenges, and where can we make the biggest difference?

For USCIB and its members, an important place to start tackling these questions is the UN’s 2030 Development Agenda and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a framework that will be at the center of this week of high-level meetings, also known as Global Goals Week.

In the face of challenges such as unemployment, climate change and population growth around the world, USCIB believes we have to pursue the SDGs as “must-wins” for the United States and for the American business community. We know that economic growth abroad helps create jobs at home. Open markets and policies that foster private investment offers new markets for our products. Innovation aimed at improved sustainability give the U.S. a leg-up in global competition while advancing investment in energy sources and new technologies to combat climate change.

That is why, this week, USCIB is holding a series of discussions on the margins of the UNGA to cultivate the “ingredients for impact” to catalyze business contributions to the SDGs. We are doing this under the theme, “Business Makes It Happen,” because we believe that, without strong commitment and incentives for the private sector, we won’t be able to achieve the Global Goals.

USCIB supports multilateral solutions to global challenges, with business constructively involved. We rely on solid, long-term dialogue and a close working relationship with both our government and the UN system to advance U.S. business contributions to sustainable development, delivering economic benefits at home and abroad. When it comes to what business depends on to succeed, thrive and lift the American economy, we look to Washington, D.C., and to the United Nations. We depend on both, and that is why USCIB has chosen to step forward as a U.S. business organization, working closely with our partners in the U.S. government as UNGA gets underway.

The “Three I’s”

The 2030 Agenda provides a blueprint for action that enjoys wide business and government support. But there are still three broad challenges in terms of implementation by business – inclusiveness, innovation and information. 

• Information: While there is more and better information available from companies on SDG action, we are overwhelmed with the quantity of data, and so we – business, governments -- don’t know where to begin to understand or prioritize action. We have too much information and not enough analysis. The business community needs to develop ways to present its progress that are accessible and relevant for the international community and national governments.
• Innovation, which is the best source of solutions for sustainability, still faces obstacles due to a lack of proper incentives for researchers, inventors and investors. The UN must do better in creating a fully welcoming environment and institutional framework for technology innovation that is genuinely involving business experts.
• Inclusiveness: A basic tenet of the Agenda for 2030 is that no one is left behind. That suggests that everyone needs to be involved to deliver solutions. Yet in some UN forums, the private sector is still not regarded as a full partner in the effort. At times, there are still political sensitivities when business wants to come to the table, or even just listen in on policy deliberations. Clearly, we in business need to do more to demonstrate commitment and deliver actual results.

Statements by both United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres and President of the General Assembly Miroslav Lajčák suggest that, under their leadership in the UNGA this year, we could see progress towards a more inclusive and transparent framework to involve the business community across the board. USCIB would endorse and welcome such a development.

By their very nature, many of the SDGs depend on partnerships to be implemented, and we regard business as indispensable in collaborative action to deliver the SDGs. On its 2nd anniversary, the USCIB web platform, Business for 2030, now showcases 200 initiatives from 52 companies, in over 150 countries, covering 85 of the 169 SDG targets. These encompass both philanthropic and corporate responsibility initiatives as well as core business operations that all contribute to achieving one or more of the 17 SDG targets.

Progress has been made, as witnessed by the strong response to this year’s SDG Business Forum on the margins of last July’s High-Level Political Forum – it literally filled the UN’s largest room, the General Assembly Hall. Governments and the UN have to continue to create those new kinds of spaces in which that exchange on policy and practice can occur substantively and with good governance.  

With our affiliations to leading global business organizations embedded in the UN system, the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) and the International Organization of Employers (IOE), we have been fortunate to be on the front lines of the collaborative discussions that brought forward the SDGs, and to foster recognized opportunities for the private sector to cooperate with the UN. The process of multilateralism does move slowly, demanding investment of time and effort, but the rewards are outcomes in which business is invested and knows what to expect.  

It is already clear to USCIB that one element of success towards efficiency and effectiveness in the reform of the UN is to create the most open and inclusive institutional structures to consult with representative business bodies, and then to recognize and include those inputs. We have seen time and again how the ILO, the OECD and other inter-governmental forums have demonstrated that including business in a recognized manner is a value add because it is brings on board those societal partners that invest, innovate and implement.

At USCIB, we are more convinced than ever that a more open and accountable policy dialogue, with recognized involvement of representative business groups, is a fundamental element of good governance (which is in fact the aim of SDG16), and will deliver real results. By and large, UN bodies are involving business in more substantive ways, and we are looking forward to this year’s UNGA to keep that discussion going, particularly in the context of UN reform.

In his report laying out his vision of UN reform, Secretary General Guterres presents eight big ideas for reform of the UN system.  At the heart of those are the 17 big commitments which the global community made in 2015: the SDGs. Our main goal this week is to join the international dialogues and offer ways to make those big ideas a reality for, and with, U.S. business.

Throughout the negotiations leading to the SDGs, and now in the period of their execution, we have underscored the need for business to be embedded in the process. This is necessary to leverage all the resources that the private sector can provide through investment, innovation and know-how. With dialogue and the right mix of incentives, business really can make it happen and we will be working throughout this year’s UNGA to continue the evolution towards collaborative and impactful SDG partnerships with business.

From September 18-22, 2017 in New York, the United Nations General Assembly will convene with a focus on the Global Goals.  According to DEVEX, key developments to watch out for during these high-level meetings include António Guterres’ debut UNGA as secretary-general, UN reform, President Trump’s speech to the U.N., and humanitarian crises. The Devex summary also flags as important the transformation and recognition of the role of the private sector to help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

In many U.N. settings, business is now acknowledged as a critical partner to help achieve the SDGs through investments, corporate responsibility, product innovation and more. This year, the International Chamber of Commerce will attend the UNGA in its capacity as an Observer Organization to the UNGA, represents thousands of companies and associations all over the world.  Other business organizations will be involved in UNGA related side events on SDG reporting, innovation and partnerships, hosted around the city.  USCIB will be on the ground all week with a series of events centered on the theme: “Business Makes It Happen.”

To read the full article, click here.

To see the latest list of UNGA week events organized by USCIB, click here.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s) were agreed  to measure progress and achievements towards a sustainable future through a series of 17 goals adopted by the UN General Assembly, as part of the 2030Agenda for Sustainable Development.  During this year’s annual UN High-Level Political Forum, held from July 10 – 19 at UN headquarters in New York, the UN member states, agencies and partners met to discuss paths to implementation and to accelerate  progress on the SDGs. USCIB and its members were on the ground during the HLPF highlighting the role of engaging all business sectors to advance  environmental, economic and social cooperation for the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

Speaking to the HLPF, USCIB Vice President for Strategic International Engagement, Energy and Environment Norine Kennedy stated, “Innovation, infrastructure, economic growth and empowerment and good governance are the four inter-linked cornerstones for all 17 SDGs for business. Therefore, it is crucial to consult with private sector groups at the national and regional level to develop enabling frameworks for business actions to advance the SDGs.”

USCIB policy experts and members joined the SDG Business Forum on July 18, the first business-organized meeting held in the UN’s General Assembly Hall. Speakers from the UN, governments, NGOs and business discussed private sector investment, information sharing and public-private partnership to take forward the 17 SDGs.  The Forum was organized by the Global Business Coalition for 2030, a coalition of major business organizations and the UN Global Compact, facilitated by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC).

USCIB member KPMG’s Nick Chism, deputy head of Global Sales and Markets and global chair of Infrastructure, Government & Healthcare, discussed the importance of creating business-friendly environment and opportunities, indicating that enabling environments will lead to more private sector investment.  Business speakers throughout the HLPF echoed the conviction that neither the SDG’s nor the wider 2030 Agenda can be achieved without active participation of business and industry, to drive inclusive economic growth and prosperity, and develop and deploy innovative technologies and practices.

For this year’s HLPF, USCIB members, including Bechtel, Cargill, Citi, Hilton, Monsanto, Novozymes and Pirelli, added new examples of actions to advance the SDGs to USCIB’s Businessfor2030 web platform.

This year’s HLPF also included several important side events in which USCIB and the International Chamber of Commerce took part:

Agriculture and Food Day, with the International Agrifood Network, July 13

USCIB Vice President for Product Policy and Innovation Mike Michener supported USCIB’s longtime partner, the International Agri-Food Network (IAFN), on their event focusing on SDG 2, Ending Hunger, during their side-event, Agriculture and Food Day on July 13. IAFN partnered with leading organizations to host this event to celebrate, discuss, negotiate, analyze, and brainstorm around the role of the agricultural and food sector in relation to the implementation of the SDGs. Agriculture and Food Day summarized the importance of targeting the agricultural sector and food issues to reach the SDGs by 2030. IAFN has been a consistent champion for a stand-alone goal on sustainable agriculture and food security.

However, “solutions cannot address just one goal, but must look to make a difference to several at once,” noted Michener.  “The purpose of Agriculture and Food Day was to examine how focusing on agricultural and food policy could achieve not only Goal 2 but make substantive contributions to the achievement of the other 16 goals.  Investments made in agriculture — the dominant occupation for the world’s poorest people — can accomplish much beyond Goal 2, including improvements in health, incomes, trade, infrastructure, and the environment,” he said.

Accelerating Women’s Economic Empowerment to Achieve the 2030 Agenda, with UN Women and ICC, July 17

USCIB’s Vice President for ICT Policy Barbara Wanner attended this  SDG5 event. SDG 5 aims to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls and calls for enhanced use of enabling technology –information and communications technologies (ICT’s) in particular—to promote the empowerment of women.

The event showcased the global efforts stakeholders have embarked on to bring women’s economic empowerment to the forefront of all the SDG targets.

“Through innovation, investment and development of products and services, the private sector plays an important role in advancing gender equality and improving the lives of women,” said Wanner.

ICC highlighted several private sector initiatives during the side-event that are catalyzing women’s economic empowerment in developed and developing countries and presented the role of ICT’s in advancing the SDG’s. 

Participants included contributors to the UN Secretary General High-Level Panel for Women’s Economic Empowerment and representatives from the governments of the United Kingdom and Costa Rica, UN Women, the International Labor Organization, ICC Secretary General John Danilovich, and Carolyn Nguyen of Microsoft who is also vice-chair of the ICC Commission on the Digital Economy. For additional information on this event, please visit ICC’s website.

In his concluding remarks to the HLPF, ICC Secretary General John Danilovich noted, “There can be no doubt that the private sector means business when it comes to the SDG’s. Since their inception, I’ve said the SDG’s should be known as the BDG’s, the Business Development Goals, and that’s because their achievement represents a clear economic imperative. Business engagement on the UN SDG’s is not only a powerful way to enhance society’s trust but also a great business opportunity. Achieving the SDG’s opens up $12 trillion in market opportunity in sectors such as food, energy, health and cities.”

The annual SDG Business Forum will meet at the United Nations Headquarters on July 18, 2017 during the ministerial segment of the High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF).  Hosted by the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA), the UN Global Compact, and organized in partnership with the Global Business Alliance (GBA) for 2030. Leaders from business, government, UN agencies, key international organizations, and civil society groups will attend the Forum to discuss and encourage business engagement in implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the 2030 Agenda.

The HLPF serves as the central UN forum to follow-up and review the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals, with the participation of all members of the United Nations and its specialized agencies. The theme for this year’s HLPF is “Eradicating poverty and promoting prosperity in a changing world.”  The 10 day meeting will focus on seven of the 17 SDGs; including Goal 1 – End Poverty, Goal 2 – End Hunger, Goal 3 – Ensure Healthy Lives, Goal 5 – Achieve Gender Equality, Goal 9 – Build Infrastructure, Foster Innovation, Goal 14 – Conserve Oceans, and Goal 17 – Strengthen Means of Implementation.

The UN 2030 Agenda is a platform for the private sector to demonstrate the central role of business in sustainable development from the standpoints of investment, innovation and implementation. From SMEs to multi-national companies, businesses are realizing the necessity of incorporating the SDGs into their business plans and practices.

The SDG Business Forum will showcase and report on how businesses of all sectors and nationalities are engaged in supporting those seven SDGs.  It will include sessions examining investment, partnerships, and monitoring implementation of the SDGs.

The SDG Business Forum will be held from 9:00 a.m. – 5:30 p.m. on July 18, 2017 in Conference Room 1.

Register for the SDG Business Forum by July 7, 2017 here.

Read more about the HLPF here.

In an article in Forbes on May 30, 2017, Tam Nguyen, global head of sustainability at Bechtel Corporation, describes how corporate sustainability is evolving with new technologies and innovation. Tam Nguyen leads and implements the corporate sustainability strategy throughout the company and their projects in 160 countries. As Vice-chair of USCIB’s Corporate Responsibility and Labor Affairs Committee, he works with member companies to communicate U.S. business action, manage risks arising from new regulatory and civil society expectations and channel USCIB member feedback into policy deliberations and standard-setting processes at international organizations. Nguyen also serves as a co-Chair of USCIB’s Working Group on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

In the interview, Nguyen indicates that technology and innovation can help corporate sustainability and companies use data and analysis to communicate actionable insights throughout their complex organizations. Such metrics will help advance the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which can be achieved by management systems and actions that companies take to become more sustainable in their operations and initiatives. By incorporating technology and innovation, companies are already implementing new practices and programs to advance the SDGs -- especially Goal 9 – Build Infrastructure, Foster Innovation. Nguyen notes that Bechtel relies on innovation to help achieve Goal 7 – Ensure Energy for All; Goal 8 – Promote Economic Growth & Decent Work; and Goal 12 – Ensure Sustainable Consumption & Production.

According to Nguyen, “sustainability is one of the biggest drivers of innovation today and into the future.” He goes on to express the significance of market and the public increasingly valuing and seeking out information on corporate sustainability performance. For Nguyen, technology and innovation help businesses function more efficiently across many sectors through sustainable methods, which will in turn help improve company reputation to customers and stakeholders. Sustainability challenges and business imperatives are opportunities for companies to align sustainability to risk management in a comprehensive way which will then help their bottom line and help business to achieve the SDGs.

Read the full interview with Tam Nguyen here.

Norine Kennedy, vice president for energy and environment of USCIB, attended the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Financing for Development Forum in New York, NY which convened from May 22-25, 2017. On May 25, Kennedy delivered a statement on behalf of the business groups working with the FfD Business Sector Steering Committee about the importance of increasing the private sector’s role in mobilizing resources for sustainable development. 

Responding to numerous government proposals to involve business in SDG implementation, Kennedy stated that the private sector is vital to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), “whether directly or through innovation and investment, public-private partnerships, provision of expertise, services and equipment, linkages with SMEs and the creation of value chains involving new technologies and processes that are cleaner and greener.” Businesses have already taken great strides to implement changes for the SDGs that were referenced in the FfD Forum, including Goal 8 – Promote Economic Growth & Decent Work; Goal 9 – Build Infrastructure, Foster Innovation; and Goal 17 – Strengthen Means of Implementation. 

However, Kennedy notes that there does need to be an increase in business engagement. Kennedy encouraged the FfD Forum to utilize the private sector to achieve the SDGs in an array of areas covered by the Forum, including finance and investment, innovation, and public-private partnerships among other matters. Public-Private Partnerships are integral to achieving the SDGs by leveraging the private sector’s resources to assist with the development efforts of the UN Member States. In her presentation on one of the Forum’s expert panels, Dr. Sirimali Fernando, Chair of the National Science Foundation of Sri Lanka, mentioned three key actions – synergize, harmonize and coordinate – that were critical to advancing innovation, and Kennedy agreed that businesses see collaborative public-private actions as vital for the SDGs.

The Financing for Development forum was established to address the follow-up and review of the commitments of the Addis Ababa Action Agenda (AAAA) regarding the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. It included special meetings with the Bretton Woods institutions, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). USCIB has been represented in the FfD Business Sector Steering Committee, led by the International Chamber of Commerce, since its inception.

Read the full speech from Norine Kennedy here.

Friday, April 21, 2017, Washington D.C. 

The agenda is available in PDF here. If you would like to attend the Roundtable, please RSVP to Mia Lauter (mlauter@uscib.org) 

USCIB will host a roundtable on infrastructure for sustainability on Friday, April 21, 8:15 am – 1:30 pm at Covington in Washington D.C. The Roundtable participants will discuss:

• where and how business is already planning for and investing in infrastructure for sustainability, what are the enabling frameworks, policies and partnerships that can be scaled for impact; 
• what new sources and approaches exist to mobilize resources and advance bankable projects for sustainability infrastructure; and
• which indicators to use to measure and report impacts of infrastructure investments by the private sector.

Both “hard” and “soft” forms of infrastructure have also figured prominently in the U.N. Financing for Development (FfD) process. The USCIB Roundtable will immediately precede the FfD Infrastructure Forum, and inform recommendations by USCIB to the U.N. High Level Political Forum meetings in July when they review SDG actions by governments, business and others.

Speakers include:

• Amb. Lisa Kubiske, Deputy Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Economics and Business Affairs, US Department of State
• Albena Melin, Principal Operations Officer, Thought Leadership & Global Engagement, Economics and Private Sector Development, International Finance Corporation
• Krishan Sharma, Senior Economist, Financing for Development Office, UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs
• Alan P. Larson, Senior International Policy Advisor, Covington

If you would like to receive an official invitation to the Roundtable, please contact Mia Lauter, mlauter@uscib.org

Over the past three decades there has been enormous progress towards achieving gender parity in education, yet according to the UNESCO Institute of Statistics, around the world there are still 62 million girls out of school. Gender inequality in education access and completion stays with girls for the rest of their lives and translates to diminished health, social and economic outcomes into adulthood.

The Benefits of Girls’ Education

Each additional year of secondary school education increases a girl’s income by 15-25 percent, unlocking not just her economic potential but that of her family and community. An educated girl in Africa is three times less likely to get HIV/AIDS, earns 25 percent more income and will re-invest 90% of her income into her family. She has a smaller, healthier family, and challenges gender based violence and discrimination.

Seizing the Opportunity

To help seize the opportunity, in 2013 Pearson joined international NGO Camfed, with support from the UK Department of International Development and relevant national Ministries of Education, to transform educational opportunities for girls from low-income communities in Zimbabwe and Tanzania. The partnership aims at improving the learning experience and outcomes for girls from rural and often marginalized areas through sustained collaboration between not-for-profit, private and government players.

Building on Camfed’s 20 years’ experience in getting girls into school across Africa, and harnessing Pearson’s global expertise in delivering innovative learning solutions, the outcomes of the partnership have been to:

1.   Enable 60,744 vulnerable girls in Zimbabwe and Tanzania to enroll in secondary school.

2.   Empower over 400,000 girls and boys in 970 rural secondary schools to improve their educational experience and learning outcomes.

3.  Create new opportunities for young women graduates of Camfed’s programs in the poorest rural communities by training them to become Learner Guides.

Learner Guides are young female role models for girls still in school, who are uniquely qualified through their own experiences of overcoming the barriers to education imposed by poverty and marginalization. Working closely with both students and school leaders, Learner Guides identify and address particular problems that girls face which impede their school attendance and learning, and deliver an innovative complementary curriculum focusing on building individual qualities, health and wellbeing, the “My Better World” program.

Developing Deeply Relevant Learning Resources with all Stakeholders

Pearson’s specific role has been to support Camfed in developing learning resources for the “My Better World” program that are relevant to young people’s experience, as well as future employability and success. In order to do this successfully, Pearson and Camfed engaged with young people and their communities, ensuring that the educational resources developed are deeply relevant to girls and boys, as well as gender sensitive. The “My Better World” curriculum and workbook help students to build self-knowledge, discover their talents, build resilience, select role models, set goals and learn how to achieve them.

Working Towards Recognized Qualifications for Young Women Mentors

Pearson has also committed to developing a BTEC qualification framework to formally recognize the work of 5,000 Learner Guides. BTEC is one of the world’s most sought-after applied learning qualifications, providing students with a clear line of sight into work and further education. The BTEC developed will be tailored to the unique needs of the Learner Guides, support their training and assessment, and certify them, which will provide a stepping stone into formal higher education, teacher training and employment. These 5,000 Learner Guides will teach and mentor over 150,000 girls to help improve their attendance, retention and learning at secondary school -- creating a virtuous cycle of learning and empowerment.

The Impact of the Learner Guide Program

In return for the Learner Guides’ commitment, they gain access to interest-free loans via Kiva to start their own businesses, providing employment opportunities to youth in their communities. Respected for their expertise at every level, these young women are multiplying the returns of their own education for the benefit of their communities.

In this video, Nasikiwa Duke, Program Manager, Young Women’s Empowerment, at Camfed Tanzania explains why Learner Guides are important role models and confidantes, and how they work with schools, teachers, and communities to keep poor and vulnerable children in school.

Content from this blog post provided by Pearson.  

At the UN General Assembly this week, Syria and the plight of its refugee citizens have been top of the agenda. In the face of challenges that will be felt for years to come, what kind of future should the rest of the world aspire to help them achieve?

Three weeks ago, I visited the Za’atari refugee camp in the north of Jordan with Save the Children, where 80,000 Syrians live, work and learn. As ever, it was talking to the young people themselves — and their parents and teachers — that made the biggest impression.

Inside Za’atari I spent time at an activity centre, where teachers were helping children learn to read, and the walls were filled with paintings and drawings. Teenage boys wanted to talk about Manchester City’s prospects in the English Premier League this season. It all seemed a very normal school scene — until I remembered I was inside the second largest refugee camp in the world.

I met the mothers of younger children, refugees from a poorer, more rural part of Syria. They were all able to read — but the mood in the room became markedly less buoyant when we asked whether their children were learning to read, too. I also watched a group of girls, some as young as 12, dance to a wonderful mix of traditional Syrian folk and very modern Arab rap. However, the story they told was about the perils of marrying very young and how a college degree was the passport to a better life.

Despite the circumstances, what struck me most in Za’atari was the community’s efforts to maintain a sense of normality. I saw well-maintained streets, tailors and even a shop selling bridal dresses. The entrepreneurial spirit of the residents is thriving. They are not looking for handouts, they just want to make their own way in the world and provide for their families.

One young Za’atari resident showed me around the house of his extended family; three shipping containers connected by corrugated iron to make a basic but welcoming home. Families like his receive UN rations of bread and 20 dina (£21) a month. Their diet is mainly bread, rice, lentils and perhaps chicken once or twice a week.

Right now, Za’atari is a basic but relatively safe space where people can live and children can learn, just 18 miles from the Syrian border and the conflict that continues to rage. But we must not think for one minute that refugee camps are a permanent solution. Only one third of the 30,000 children in Za’atari are actually in school. Many have family support networks, but others have lost their relatives in the war.

The term ‘refugees’ conjures up a homogeneous mass of people — but the Syrians displaced by the conflict are just as diverse as the members of any nation. Each individual I met has their own skills, challenges and ambitions. 80% of Syrians in Jordan are not actually in camps, but living side by side with Jordanians.

In Jordan’s capital, Amman, I visited two Children and Family Centres that Pearson is funding with Save the Children, to increase access to quality education for Syrian refugees and local children. There I watched a group of bright, lively teenagers having a math lesson.

They want to be engineers, doctors, teachers, dancers, tech entrepreneurs — and they’re plenty smart enough to achieve their dreams. But it is going to be hard when that was the only math lesson most of them get each week.They spend far more of their time working to earn money — not much more than a dollar an hour — to support their families.

There will come a time when the brutal conflict will end — but the debilitating effects of a missed education will stay with a child for the rest of his or her life. Investment into Syria itself may be nearly impossible whilst the civil war continues but the education of millions of innocent Syrians does not need to stop. Whether in camps like Za’atari or in the countries where they have found refuge, we have the choice to invest now or lose an entire generation.

The world’s largest companies have a responsibility. Businesses have the reach, expertise and resources to make a real difference for people affected by conflict. This doesn’t just mean charity, it means real investment.

The Syrians I met wanted to gain the knowledge and skills so they would thrive in companies like Pearson. Many also wanted to build their own businesses and drive the growth of their country once the fighting has ended. It’s in everyone’s interests for business to invest in these people as much as they’re investing in themselves.

Right now the world’s leaders are meeting at the UN and discussing the plight of young Syrians. I have been sharing the stories of the people I met with other business-leaders to see how, with partners like Save the Children and others, we can do more to provide support and investment.

Working together, we can ensure that the horrors of this conflict do not leave a permanent scar on this generation of Syrians.

***

An original version of this article was published on 22.09.16 in City A.M. It can be viewed here.

You can learn more about Pearson and Save the Children’s ‘Every Child Learning’ partnership here.

Key themes emphasized throughout diverse HLPF meetings and side-events included building the capacities of governments and local institutions to enable coherent data collection to aid policy-making initiatives that create an enabling environment for politically, environmentally, socially, and economically inclusive societies that leave no one behind.  Additionally, during the General Debate among Member States, several countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, and Myanmar, noted that corporate social responsibility, national ownership, and sustained, effective partnerships that address the root causes of issues such as poverty need to be harnessed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).  Below, we highlight how these themes were elaborated upon in various HLPF meetings and side events, with a particular focus on the role of business.

Partnership Exchange

The Partnership Exchange was organized by the Division for Sustainable Development of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA), in cooperation with the United Nations Office for Partnerships (UNOP).  The theme of this event was supporting the SDGs through multi-stakeholder partnerships, ensuring that no one is left behind.

The Partnership Exchange featured over 20 partnerships that cover all 17 SDGs.  Some of the initiatives highlighted included:

• The Partnerships for SDGs Online Platform - a repository for multi-stakeholder partnerships hosted by UN-DESA, many of which originate from large international sustainable development conferences pre-dating the 2030 Agenda.  The Platform currently hosts  2,119 Partnerships registered through numerous “Action Networks.” Business for 2030 is the only business-led “Action Network” on the Platform.

• The UN Business Action Hub - designed to accelerate partnerships between the UN and the private sector, this Hub, hosted by the UN Global Compact, is being revitalized to help  achieve the SDGs.  The Hub is a UN-system wide interagency initiative, developed between 2009 and 2010, also pre-dating the SDGs.  The platform currently features 35 active UN entities with more than 450 projects, commitments, and pledges.  The platform is also used to connect the UN and business during emergencies.

• The Multi-Stakeholder Partnership for Enhancing Policy Coherence for Sustainable Development - focused on Target 17.14 (on policy coherence), this platform will host a virtual discussion starting in  September to support  policy makers and key stakeholders who want to formulate, implement, and monitor policy coherence for sustainable development as a key means of implementing the 2030 Agenda.

Furthermore, during the first session, Lise Kingo, the Executive Director of the UN Global Compact, announced the launch of the Partnership Data for SDGs Initiative, which is a joint project of UN-DESA, the UN Global Compact, and the UN Office for Partnerships.  Ms. Kingo noted that “the initiative hopes to bring more transparency, coherence, impact, and comparability to the work carried out through partnerships and voluntary initiatives in support of the SDGs.”

Launch of 2016 OECD Development Co-operation Report  

The OECD hosts the Development Assistance Committee (DAC), the main forum for policy alignment between the world’s donor countries. As part of its work, the OECD annually releases a Development Co-operation Report. This year’s report was launched during the HLPF at an event organized by the United Kingdom Mission to the United Nations, the OECD, and the Mexican Agency for International Development.  The report explores the potential and challenges of investing in developing countries, in particular through social impact investment, blended finance and foreign direct investment, and highlights the challenges in mobilising and measuring private finance to achieve the SDGs The report also provides guidance on responsible business conduct as a key component of implementing the SDGs.  Throughout the report, practical examples illustrate how business is already promoting sustainable development and inclusive growth in developing countries. Part II of the report showcases the profiles and performance of all donor countries, and presents DAC statistics on official and private resource flows.

Louise Kantrow, the International Chamber of Commerce’s Representative to the UN (USCIB’s global partner), spoke on the panel that reflected on the report, which was moderated by the Deputy Secretary General of the OECD, Douglas Frantz of the United States.  USCIB’s Ariel Meyerstein also made an intervention highlighting how the Business for 2030 website has already started the work of measuring business contributions to development cooperation and achieving the SDGs through philanthropic contributions or social impact activity and partnerships by collecting anecdotes of business activity.  But Mr. Meyerstein also noted that we need more formalized recognition by the UN and development actors of how existing corporate reporting frameworks align with the SDG targets and forthcoming indicators, so we can better measure corporate contributions to the SDGs and also identify gaps and opportunities for scaling-up in different sectors, countries and with respect to different Goals.  

This new category of development cooperation has been highlighted in a report by the UN’s ECOSOC Development Cooperation Forum, which points out that this form of development cooperation is poorly understood and that much data gathering and analysis needs to be done to understand it better, but that the evidence suggests that it is growing faster than Official Development Assistance.  Notably, the OECD’s proposed measurement of Total Official Support for Sustainable Development (TOSSD) - which received encouraging support in the Addis Ababa Financing for Development outcome document - would exclude this form of private sector development cooperation because such efforts are not ‘officially supported’ flows, so we still don’t have an agreed way of measuring them.

High-Level Side-Event on Leaving No Country Behind – Sustainable Industrialization and Infrastructure to Support Landlocked Developing Countries (LLDCs)

One of the main takeaways from this event was that opportunities exist in Landlocked Developing Countries (LLDCs) for the private sector to construct and amplify “LLDCs’ productive capacity, export growth, technology transfer, diffusion of productive know-how and skills, employment generation, infrastructure development,” and instituting new markets that encompass high-value added products and services. H.E. Mr. Jan Kickert, the Permanent Representative of Austria to the United Nations, outlined that “the old model of industrialization will not work,” so we need new kinds of industrialization “to achieve Agenda 2030.”  Mr. Kickert highlighted that addressing good governance and rule of law gaps and implementing structural reforms are all critical to attracting foreign direct investment.  To attain sustainable industrialization, Mr. Kickert stressed that sustainable energy is vital, and that LLDCs should pursue partnerships to achieve this objective.

Mr. Bernard Kamphasa, Former Secretary from Zambia, noted that Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) are important in bridging the digital divide, which has also led to a lack of adequate data.  This is a key challenge for LLDCs, he noted, as it pertains to the transportation sector.  Likewise, he observed that regional or sub-regional level challenges include lack of established knowledge sharing mechanisms.  

High-Level Side-Event on Partnerships to End Forced Labour in Global Supply Chains

The High-Level Side-Event on Partnerships to End Forced Labour in Global Supply Chains was co-organized by the Permanent Mission of Argentina, the United States Mission and the International Labour Organization (ILO).  The event focused on a critical aspect of business engagement in the SDGs, namely, doing no harm by ensuring responsible and sustainable sourcing and production practices. The key question addressed by panelists, as stated by Mr. Kevin Cassidy was: “how to ensure that supply chains can be a positive force for quality job creation as well as sustainable and inclusive social and economic development?” More specifically, the event explored “the challenges in supply chains, the responses of the private sector and beyond; the salient challenges in governance; and what guidance programs and initiatives are needed to achieve this goal.”

During her remarks, US Ambassador to ECOSOC Sarah Mendelson underscored that “it was a hard fought victory on including ending human trafficking as part of the SDGs” (Targets 5.2, 8.7, and 16.2 respectively).  Ms. Mendelson emphasized the importance of educating the public about the SDGs, consistent with her belief that “social marketing can change behavior” and that “[b]rand influence can transcend generations and borders and translate policies into effective action.”  Highlighting the scope of human trafficking and forced labor globally cited in the US State Department’s 2016 Trafficking in Persons Report (77, 823 identified victims, and 18,930 prosecutions that contributed to 6,609 convictions; 20.9 million people experience forced labor according to the ILO) she stressed the need for partnerships to combat these violations.

The event served as a launchpad and brain-storming session for such a partnership: the Dignity Partnership to End Forced Labor in Supply Chains, which will be a collaboration by Member States and companies across different sectors to (i) adhere to “The Dignity Partnership Declaration,” a mission statement of the Partnership to be shaped at the event, (ii) develop social marketing campaigns with domestic and international outreach with the goal of making the public, especially youth, aware of the SDG commitments on eradicating human trafficking with a particular focus on supply chains (iii) enforce laws, and enact where necessary, addressing human trafficking (iv) agree to report instances of human trafficking to appropriate national authorities, and (v) engage in peer-to-peer, B2B, learning on best practices.

Business for 2030 helped curate one of the day’s sessions, which featured a 17 person ‘rapid fire’ review of 17 different business people addressing each SDG.  Below are key points and outcomes from a few of the SDG Business Forum’s sessions.

High-Level Welcome Plenary

H.E. Mr. Thomas Gass, Assistant Secretary-General, Policy Coordination & Inter-Agency Affairs, UN Department of Economic & Social Affairs, stated that “the 2030 Agenda is the product of a transparent, inclusive, and participatory process,” that the spirit of shared ownership must live on, and that stakeholders must feel the agenda is theirs to implement.  Additionally, Mr. Gass noted that diverse partnerships must be formed for the implementation of the SDGs and that there is a great opportunity to build partnerships across businesses.  

Carolyn Miles, CEO, Save the Children, highlighted the work her organization has completed in collaboration with the private sector.  For instance, in 2012, Save the Children worked with UNICEF on developing a framework for the rights of children in business “UNICEF’s Children’s Rights and Business Principles.”  Ms. Miles noted that the launch of the SDGs allows Save The Children to pair private profits with public good through partnerships with, companies such as GlaxoSmithKline, with whom it has co-developed a heat-stable gel for umbilical chords, which has saved thousands of lives.

Following the opening of the Forum, John Danilovich, the ICC Secretary General and Lise Kingo, the Executive Director of the UN Global Compact, signed a Memorandum of Understanding that formalized many of the ways the two organizations have already been closely collaborating.  The MOU stressed, among other things, the need to enhance UN engagement with business around the SDGs and the potential for further increasing business and industry engagement in the implementation of the 2030 Agenda.

Session 1: Business for Agenda 2030

In a series of rapid fire presentations, business representatives highlighted examples of what they are doing to implement each SDG and move Agenda 2030 forward.  Click here for a brief recap of all 17 presentations.  Most of the initiatives are now also featured on the Business for 2030 website, created by USCIB, which now has 160 initiatives by 45 companies taking place in over 150 countries that relate to 80 of the 169 SDG targets.  Several USCIB members, including Baker McKenzie, MasterCard, Novozymes, and Pfizer provided case studies during the panel.  The dynamic session was ably moderated by H.E. Mr. Ib Petersen, Ambassador to the UN for Denmark, who kept the diverse interventions from the 17 business speakers and several Member States and others from the floor all within the two-hour time limit, setting, what Mr. Petersen said, must have been a UN-record.

Session 2: Private Sector Investment in the 2030 Agenda: Going from Billions to Trillions

This session analyzed, from a private and public sector viewpoint, how business can be more engaged in defining the policy reform agenda, particularly with respect to anti-corruption, peace and the rule of law, which ultimately can facilitate private sector investments and operations.

Jay Collins, Vice Chairman of Corporate and Investment Banking of USCIB member Citigroup Inc., focused on the importance of measurement in working towards the SDGs: more indicators are needed to help smaller businesses report their progress. Mr. Collins also referred to green bonds as an example of utilizing markets to achieve the SDGs. The green bonds market has blossomed into a $40 billion business, and still has room for improvement. Moreover, Mr. Collins underlined the need for markets to impact multiple SDGs in order to move “billions to trillions.” To target more SDGs, Mr. Collins recommended creating new metrics so that markets can be created around them. Mr. Collins concluded with the remark that partnerships have yielded progress toward multiple SDGs, and should be continued as a result.

Manuel Sager, Director General, Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, discussed improving the investment climate, beginning with eliminating corruption. Secondly, Mr. Sager used the example of the Swiss Capacity Building Facility as a way to reduce costs by providing grants for financial service providers in other countries so as to assist the poorer population. Thirdly, Mr. Sager spoke about leveraging private funds through guarantees, derisking, and microfinance. The latter now amounts to over $1 billion in investments, but Mr. Sager warned that one has to be particularly careful with microfinance, as it could cause heavy losses in the job market. Mr. Sager concluded by highlighting the importance of sharing information.

Li Yong, Director General of the United Nations Industrial and Development Organization (UNIDO), spoke about the past success of Private Public Partnerships (PPPs), referring to a repertoire of government partnerships he worked on under UNIDO and in China.  Mr. Yong noted that PPPs are very much a proven method and should be continued. In particular, Mr. Yong cited his experience at the Asian Development Bank (ADB), in which the government’s involvement tripled Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in only one year from $50 billion to $150 billion. Mr. Yong extended this approach under UNIDO through the Programme for Country Partnership (PCP), which created jobs and increased income in many countries.

Session 3:  Private Sector Participation in Partnerships

Florinel Andrei spoke about the success and rapid expansion of the International Arbitration Court for Transport. The initiative offers the global sector of transport a modern resolution instrument for a variety of travel: road, rail, maritime, air, energy, etc... The international arbitration court for transport is a multimodal institution—the court has 25 arbitrators from 12 countries. The organization has worked specifically toward SDGs 8, 9, and 16 (specifically worked on by The International Network of Specialized Arbitration). The heavy expansion of this committee—most recently extending to Spain and Azerbaijan—shows the success.

Joy Marini discussed the involvement of Johnson & Johnson in working toward SDGs 5 and 6 (on a commitment made in 2010). They have reached 400 million women and children since then. All these people have been reached through partnerships. J&J has over 500 partnerships, many of which are public/private. Survive and Thrive has been a partnership that has trained 300k health workers in the last 5 years. Survive and Thrive had started as a 6 component partnership. Today the initiative has expanded to 16, including another private sector corporation. Ms. Marini remarks that partnerships have been essential to the success of these programs, however, they are definitely tough undertakings.

Sean Tompkins of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors emphasizes the importance of standards to the SDGs, with his specialty being in the building/construction/infrastructure industry. Standards are crucial as they increase investor confidence and help reduce risk. Mr. Tompkins used the example of buildings to underline this proposition. Buildings emit 40% of the world’s carbon through their construction and use, and 30% of the world’s resources. However, no two places in the world measure the size of building in the same way. Thus, having even rigorous and accessible indicators is not enough to measure SDG progress with regards to emissions—building measurements vary up to 24% throughout the world. Mr. Tompkins focuses on creating standards that will help solve these problems. His organization managed to bring together 70 corporations under one standard of measurement (these standards are also being adapted by governments).

Jong II Lee spoke about Korea Telecom's involvement in the SDGs. KT has 131 years of history and has formed numerous partnerships throughout these years which reach poor populations and provide them with educational opportunities and other resources.  KT forms partnerships with both central and local governments to help improve conditions in less developed and remote areas. Mr. Lee also noted that partnerships are key for business to showcase new technology and provide opportunities for new market entry.

Session 4: Monitoring the SDGs: The Business Perspective

This session discussed how business can continue to help develop indicators, as well as the extent to which business is examining the value and role of indicators developed at sectoral and sub-national levels. 

Dr. Lisa Bersales, Co-Chair, Inter-Agency Experts Group on the SDGs (IAEG-SDGs) noted that the UN Statistical Commission has agreed upon 230 indicators for the SDG targets.  The expert group was instructed that each target should have at least one indicator.  The initial list, she noted, is not cast in stone, but rather, was just the first set of indicators used to measure the SDGs. The initial list has been categorized into three tiers: 

• targets with existing methodology with data

• targets with existing methodology with little data

• and targets with no methodology and no data

Annika Lindblom, Ministerial Adviser, National Commission on Sustainable Development of  Finland noted that Finland is one of the countries that had volunteered to report on its progress during this first HLPF.  Ms. Lindblom noted that Finland has managed to reach out to and engage individual companies, 60 of whom have committed to follow up with concrete and measurable indicators.  In addition, indicators have been Finland’s key integration tools.  Finland has already developed 39 unique indicators, which it will now align with the 2030 Agenda indicators. Of the indicators proposed by the Statistical Commission, Finland already gathers data on 42% of them, whereas another 43% will require specialized collection for the 2030 Agenda.

Claudio Volonte, Principal Results Measurement Specialist in the Development Impact Department of the International Finance Corporation (IFC) underscored that the private sector will need support from governments by way of enabling environments for their new investments.  Specifically, SMEs have limited capacity in reporting their contributions to SDGs.  Consequently, the IFC has made sure that the indicators are simple and relevant to SME’s businesses.  The IFC analyzed their individual business, and customized the indicators, aligning the systems to avoid asking for additional information the company wouldn’t find beneficial.  The IFC has attempted harmonizing key indicators of private sector development with their methodologies: about 30% of indicators are in tier 3 (no methodologies and no data).  Nevertheless, he noted, the private sector can invest in developing new methodologies to improve overall coverage of the indicators by business metrics.

Concluding Remarks

Wrapping-up the very successful event, which had a full audience for the entire day, The ICC Secretary General John Danilovich noted:

“Our message to governments and the UN High Level Political Forum is simple: work with us to put in place the policy frameworks needed to unleash new waves of business investment, innovation and trade in support of the Global Goals.”

After recent international agreements on Climate Change, Sustainable Development and Financing For Development, “Public-Private-Partnerships” are now seen as a way to combine economic, environmental and social criteria that result in multiple and mutually reinforcing benefits for a number of stakeholders.  

However, a “PPP” is more than just “Public”, “Private” or a “Partnership”. It is a series of underlying behaviors:

Patience – as a virtue and a value: If “Rome wasn’t built in a day”, and a “Week is a long time in politics”, in an era of intense pressure to deliver results fast, seamless real time reporting of current events and seemingly even faster analysis, the time required to build and execute complex multi stakeholder partnerships might seem glacial.  And although taking too simplistic a view would miss the point, these types of partnerships need to be able address potential perception issues. Whatever the external pressures or environment, how such a partnership attracts, obtains and maintains support from key stakeholders is critical to its overall success.

Perseverance – with a side order of passion:  Even the most well aligned, thoroughly researched and supported partnership is going to have a bad day – or week – at the office. Given the complexities often involved this is almost inevitable. But when a team needs to dig deep, the upfront investment in aligning interests, agreeing on approaches and building a strong team on all sides can be the difference between giving up and keeping going.   

Potential – with an eye on the future: Innovative approaches towards Sustainable Development and Multi Stakeholder Partnering are being pioneered by a number of Corporations such as Novozymes, Multilateral Financing Institutions such as the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), and Academic Institutions such as McGill University.  Why? Because over the longer term, many stakeholders –including a growing number of investors – believe that stakeholder support for their activities are likely to help yield better short term results across a number of inter-connected social, environmental and economic ecosystems.  

When it comes to the “How”, and especially in terms of further expanding the sustainable development modus operandi, for many stakeholders, PPPs are very much a “learning by doing” exercise, albeit building on some of the best expertise available.

So to help encourage even more free-flowing thinking – and doing – around partnerships for Development, supported by some of the most out of the box thinkers on the planet at Google, The IDB and McGill have invited a host of stakeholders, including Novozymes, to spend some time together this summer. 

The aim is that by bringing some great minds to share learnings and ideas, ways in which the PPP model for Sustainable Development can be taken to the next level will emerge- enhancing another PPP: People, Progress, and Planet.  

Brands today face increasing expectations from ever more Empowered Consumers who hold businesses to higher standards than ever before. This Empowered Consumer is driven by values—she looks beyond affordability and quality to brands’ impact on individuals, communities, and societies. She is informed—she has access to more information than has ever been available, and has the ability to cultivate a deeper knowledge of companies’ operations and the footprint they leave behind. She is connected—she lives in an age in which more than a billion tweets, Facebook posts, and blog updates are published daily, and can instantly voice her satisfaction—or lack thereof—with brands who operate in unsustainable ways. And she has the power to be selective—she has access to as many as 140,000 products at today’s largest megastore, and can take business away from those that fail to operate sustainably in favor of those that do. 

To thrive in this new context where The Empowered Consumer holds more knowledge and power than ever before, businesses are increasingly looking to integrate sustainability into their operations. Yet while companies have long been in the business of generating profit, generating social and environmental returns comes less naturally, with many struggling to identify how to link social good to their core business, and lacking the capacity to measure their efforts. Given that development actors increasingly rely on corporate participation to achieve viability and innovation, it’s clear that challenges are faced by the public, private, and non-profit sectors alike: development actors must involve companies to make their efforts inventive and sustainable, while businesses looking to stay competitive must engage in development to effect the root causes of social problems where they do business or to better integrate sustainability into their business practices, but lack the skills to do so effectively. 

So how are we to fill this gap? We at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) believe the answer lies in empowering today’s leaders to think and do things differently. In Montreal this July, we will be doing just that. In partnership with the Institute for the Study of International Development at McGill University, ranked among the top 25 universities globally, and Google, we have developed an executive education certificate program which strives to give today’s professionals the collaborative, 360° approach they need to bring these worlds together. From July 25 - 29, the “Real Development, a Good Business Strategy? Closing the Gap” program will tap into the expertise of McGill faculty, IDB specialists, and forward-thinking actors like the Calvert Foundation, Google, Novozymes, PepsiCo, and The Coca-Cola Company to help participants rethink how they think. Exploring the question, “is real development a good business strategy?” participants will leave this program with a clear answer, and a deep understanding of how to transform their organizations for the better. Register today. 

“In this Forum, we should not just be talking about technology innovation in general - what we are interested in here are transformative technologies for the SDGs”

•    Ambassador Macharia Kamau (Kenya’s Permanent Representative to the UN & co-chair STI Forum)

Can the STI Forum Itself Be Transformative?

The first annual U.N. Multi-Stakeholder Forum on Science, Technology and Innovation for the Sustainable Development Goals (STI Forum) met on June 6th-7th at the United Nations in New York.   Ambassador Macharia Kamau, Kenya’s Permanent Representative to the UN, and Mr. Vaughan Terukian, Science Advisor to the US Secretary of State, chaired the discussions.

Part of the UN Technology Facilitation Mechanism (TFM), the STI Forum is intended to:

- help analyze technology needs and gaps for scientific collaboration, innovation, and capacity-building to achieve the SDGs;

- support development of multi-stakeholder networks and partnerships to advance STI for the SDGs. 

So, will the STI Forum itself be a “transformative” body in the UN, and break the prevailing North-South gridlock on ‘technology transfer and cooperation?”  It is too soon to judge the impact it will have, but its first meeting gave reasons for optimism.  Conducted as an interactive and open dialogue, it’s format was a considerable departure from many UN meetings, giving almost equal time to government, UN, NGO and business speakers throughout the session.  The Co-Chairs and moderators added their guiding questions, inviting comments on next steps.

Business at the STI Forum

Business weighed-in throughout the two day discussion, bringing practical guidance with a focus on establishing supportive governance frameworks and exploring a wide diversity of partnerships.  A prime example was the intervention of Solomon Assefa, Head of Research for IBM Africa, who presented the company’s approach to advancing not just their own innovation initiatives, but their involvement of their local community through partnerships, training and other collaborative efforts.  He emphasized the importance to use all vehicles for innovation, whether internal or in multi-stakeholder discussions.  

Louise Kantrow, ICC’s Permanent Representative to the UN, stated the commitment of the Global Business Alliance for 2030 to mobilizing private sector innovation in technology and practice for the SDGs. 

Norine Kennedy, USCIB’s Vice President for Environment, Energy and Strategic International Engagement highlights that innovative technology’s potential to advance the SDGs depended on broad dissemination and deployment:

"Whole of economy approaches will be needed, and innovation ecosystems have to function effectively, have to be economically sustainable, have to provide shared value in the global marketplace.   This depends not only on STI policy, but also on trade policy, IP protection, good governance, and other key areas."

Innovation Ecosystems for the SDGs: A Wide Range of Options Tabled at the STI Forum

The emphasis throughout the two day Forum was on enabling policies and practices at national and regional levels, with a broad consideration of different approaches to creating and reinforcing “innovation ecosystems,” whether through partnerships, public-private coalitions, or academic and R&D incubators.

In particular, the Forum’s Ministerial Dialogue on “Effective Science, Technology and Innovation Policy Frameworks” featured notable policy initiatives and recommendations: 

China described its national STI for SDG Strategy (“STI for Social Development”) including the formation of a green technology bank as a supporting mechanism for innovation.  China has also established bilateral channels, which allowed 10,000 scientists from 120 developing countries to receive training within the country, and has instituted 189 national sustainable development pilots.  

Kenya presented its approach to STI policy as an integral component of its national Vision 2030 Plan for global competitiveness and economic development.  The comprehensive policy package includes STI recommendations for priority SDGs, including jobs and economic growth, poverty, health and gender equality.  While the presentation highlighted “an IPR regime” as part of Kenya’s STI infrastructure, it also referred to “facilitation of acquisition of IPRs by scientists, researchers and innovators,” which could be interpreted in several ways.

Chile discussed its initiatives for STEM education, and the encouragement of open innovation platforms for local entrepreneurs in order to facilitate the adoption and adaptation of new technologies.  

The International Labor Organization (ILO) underscored that the future of work is affected by STI through its effects on productive capacity.  Challenges and opportunities include the impacts on employment presented by automation trends, “ultra flexibilization,” and the emergence of so-called “zero contracts.”  

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) noted that it actively assists countries with reviews of science and technology policies to identify areas of intervention and then develops action plans in which good practices and lessons learned serve as a basis for policy adjustments.

Continuing and Broadening the Dialogue in the STI Forum and TFM

The TFM needs to advance dialogue, action and partnership on technological innovation in practical, inclusive and prioritized ways.  In other words, the TFM and STI Forum need to construct their own “eco-systems for innovation” inside the UN’s institutional architecture.  

What would that include?  In our view, the TFM should move to involve business experts, either in expanding the “Group of 10” on its existing Advisory Committee or including representative business experts in some advisory capacity.  If the STI Forum does decide to move to provide technology roadmaps or expert working groups, as the Co-Chairs suggested, the specific topics should seek the broadest engagement of business sectors, not only along sectoral lines, but also across supply and value chains.  

The first UN STI Forum was noteworthy: it set the stage for out of the box dialogue and consideration of collaboration to share knowledge, promote innovation and jump-start R&D relevant to the SDGs across education, academia and business. The private sector is ready to offer perspectives, know-how and experience to inform its further work.

A glance at the provisional agenda shows an impressive line-up of academic, public sector, and U.N. speakers that will cover a range of topics. But is it reflective of the main actors involved in technology innovation and its deployment?

Surprisingly, business representation on the program seems rather limited.  Innovation and its deployment depends to a substantial degree on business, and this will be especially true concerning the SDGs’ deployment, which is intended to be universal across all countries and mobilize not just states, but also the private sector and civil society.  The business community represents a deep and wide “talent pool,” which the STI Forum and the UN as whole should tap in implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

From a business standpoint, questions for attention at next week’s session include:

1. What specific mechanisms (e.g. networks or partnerships) will the STI Forum foster in order to leverage the resources of the business sector (micro-enterprises, cooperatives, small and medium enterprises, multinationals, state-owned enterprises)?
2. Are there specific sustainable development priorities (i.e. inclusive growth, social equity and progress, environmental protection) the mechanisms will seek to prioritize over others?  How will these priorities and strategies for investment be decided upon?  How will business’ views on those priorities and their implementation be solicited?
3. How will progress of STI Forum initiatives be measured?

Going into next week’s discussions, this post provides some useful background and structural explanation of the Technology Facilitation Mechanism and its objectives.

Where did the STI Forum Come From?  

The STI Forum meeting is convened by the Technology Facilitation Mechanism (TFM), a new UN body established by the Addis Ababa Action Agenda on Financing for Development, and first mentioned in the UN Rio+20 outcome, The Future We Want (Target 17.6).  Its mandate is to advance the technology components of the SDGs and the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Agenda.

"Target 17.6

Enhance North-South, South-South and triangular regional and international cooperation on and access to science, technology and innovation and enhance knowledge sharing on mutually agreed terms, including through improved coordination among existing mechanisms, in particular at the United Nations level, and through a global technology facilitation mechanism"

The TFM’s purpose is to support the achievement of the SDGs, further multi-stakeholder collaboration in that pursuit, and strengthen coherence and synergies among science and technology initiatives already operating within the UN system.  The STI Forum is one of three components of the TFM , which also includes:

• an online platform and channel for information on existing STI measures, techniques, and programs;

• a UN Inter-agency Task team on Science, Technology and Innovation for the SDGs (IATT)

The main engagement point for business in the TFM is the Multi-stakeholder 10-Member Group of Experts appointed by the Secretary-General to present ideas, guidance, and recommendations to the UN Inter-agency Task Team on Science, Technology and Innovation for the Sustainable Development Goals (IATT).  Interestingly, the multi-stakeholder group’s first cohort has only one business representative, which seems less than desirable given the critical role business plays in sharing knowledge and expertise on technology issues.    

Nonetheless, the STI Forum provides an opportunity to begin a discussion about improving  opportunities for the private sector to engage in this important policy conversation with clear focus on the SDGs as the framework for action.

STI Forum Objectives/Framework

The STI Forum has several ambitious objectives:

• to promote STI for the SDGs by Member States, mobilise action and partnerships

• offer a platform for exchange on applying STI to the SDGs,

• develop ideas for the TFM online platform.  

More specifically, the STI Forum aspires to present a venue for enabling interaction, matchmaking and the development of multi-stakeholder networks and partnerships that can help analyze technology needs and gaps as it pertains to scientific collaboration, innovation, and capacity-building in the context of achieving the SDGs.  

The following questions will guide the discussions next week:

1) Why are science, technology and innovation essential for the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals?

2) What are the main opportunities and challenges – at policy, organisational and individual levels - for maximizing the contribution of science, technology and innovation to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals?

3) What are the key elements that countries and international organizations may need to take into account in formulating action plans and/or roadmaps for science, technology and innovation for the Sustainable Development Goals?

4) How can we deploy existing knowledge and new, innovative solutions and technologies and make them more readily available to those who need them?

5) What would be success criteria for the STI Forum in the coming years? What questions should the STI Forum focus on?

For business, a critical area of interest in these discussions is the question of how to strengthen existing ecosystems for innovation and create them where they do not exist . Innovation ecosystems are the enabling environments necessary to promote innovation, particularly the foundational building block of functioning intellectual property rights regimes.

Where Does the New UN Technology Bank for LDCs Fit In?

Concurrently, the UN is instituting  a new Technology Bank (TB) for Least Developed Countries (LDCs) in Istanbul, following from a 2011 commitment and subsequent support in the Addis Ababa Action Agenda.  The TB LDCs now has a Governing Council and a dedicated trust fund that is officially open for voluntary contributions from Member States. The TB LDCs, whose development was supported by a High-Level Panel of Experts in 2015, is modeled after the United Nations University and is intended to strengthen national capabilities and provide expertise to LDCs to ensure that they are not left behind technologically.

"Target 17.8

Fully operationalize the technology bank and science, technology and innovation capacity-building mechanism for least developed countries by 2017 and enhance the use of enabling technology, in particular information and communications technology"

The Technology Bank for LDCs will consist of

• a bank of patents to assist LDCs with accessing and using suitable technologies;

• a Science, Technology, and Innovation Supporting Mechanism to aid with enhancing scientific research and innovation platforms of LDCs; and

• a science and technology research repository to advance global networking of researchers and research institutions in LDCs.  

It aims to

• enhance scientific research and innovation platforms,

• encourage networking between researchers and research institutions,

• assist these actors with access to and use of critical technologies,

• pull together bilateral opportunities and backing by multilateral institutions and the private sector, improving on existing international initiatives.

Zeroing in on Innovation - Embedding The Real World in UN Technology Discussions

A key element of innovation ecosystems and their dissemination of know-how and technology are identifying and working with various pathways for technology transfer and cooperation - whether through private-private, public-private and other means.  While technology flows through a variety of cooperative and ODA channels, the private sector functions as a central agent of technology transfer and deployment.

As noted in the United Nations General Assembly Technology Bank and Science, Technology and Innovation Supporting Mechanism Dedicated to the Least Developed Countries Report of the Secretary-General:

"In their efforts to encourage and promote technology transfer, developed country governments are usually limited by two factors: (1) they do not own the vast majority of such technologies; (2) they cannot force the private sector to transfer its technologies. Incentives can therefore only take the form of encouragement, promotion and facilitation of projects which are part of a global and comprehensive approach to development...."

For business, this comprehensive approach to development in the context of the SDGs must work in harmony with  innovation ecosystems and global markets.  

Since the SDGs call for transforming  the economic and political relationships with developing, emerging, and developed countries, the STI Forum/Technology Bank should consider how to involve global AND local business communities, even in LDCs, to scale-up and spread innovation for the SDGs.  In addition, technological progress presents novel and cost-effective resolutions to challenges in key areas of sustainability such as climate change, healthcare and agriculture. As a result, it is vital that the STI Forum’s platform tie in to networks that enable the business sector to engage in partnerships that catalyze achieving the SDGs.

As business prepares to join the STI Forum discussions next week, we will be looking to bring a “real world” perspective and suggestions to utilize and incentivize private sector investment and action in their efforts to promote and scale up technology innovation for the SDGs.

References

Giovannini, Enrico, Ingeborg Niestroy, Mans Nilsson, Francoise Roure, and Michael Spanos.  2015.  The Role of Science, Technology and Innovation Policies to Foster the Implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) Report of the Expert Group “Follow-up to Rio+20, notably the SDGs”  European Commission Directorate-General for Research and Innovation Climate Action, Environment, Resource Efficiency, and Raw Materials

Brant, Jennifer, and Balaji Parthasarathy.  2015.  Innovation And Intellectual Property Series.  The Dynamics of Global Technology.  Pg 5. Research Paper 4  International Chamber of Commerce.

Governments and stakeholders have spent the first months of 2016 discussing the implementation of the new 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including how the UN will support the agenda as an institution and will monitor and review progress towards 2030.  A key question in these discussions is how the UN will integrate the views of the diverse stakeholders -- essentially all of humanity -- who have an interest in the 2030 Agenda’s success and therefore have an opinion about its implementation at all levels -- globally, regionally and, most importantly, nationally.  While this may seem like an overly bureaucratic and speech-filled exercise, it is actually vital work:  without the right process and structure, it will be much more difficult to identify gaps, track action and impacts, and build bridges not only between governments but also with business and civil society, both of whom are called to action alongside governments to help achieve the 2030 Agenda.

As the outcome documents of the 2030 Agenda recognize themselves, business will play a critical role in its implementation and ultimate achievement in all countries because it's business is the chief engine of economic growth, driver of innovation, and builder of infrastructure that undergirds other social progress. But there are substantial concerns that we do not yet have the structures in place at a policy level to attract and catalyze the requisite business expertise, resources and motivation to aid with implementation.

Challenges to business engagement in the current model

One obstacle to reaching the broad mobilization and knowledge sharing that we need is the current structure for non-state actor (“stakeholder”) engagement in the 2030 Agenda. This architecture is a relic of Agenda 21 from twenty years ago and no longer adequately reflects the diversity and involvement of non-governmental and business entities in the UN’s approach to sustainable development.  The current model lumps business in with all other so-called “major groups,” including important and valued representatives of civil society such as youth, the scientific community, workers, and others. In practice, this means that all of global business -- with its diversity across industries and geographies -- must often be reduced to only a few representatives, and is often expected to join consensus messaging with other stakeholder representatives, some of whom have substantial differences of view with business. This model persists even while it is widely acknowledged that business will shoulder an amount of the implementation burden disproportionate to the aggregate efforts of these other vital stakeholders, whose opinions and concerns must also be heard by Member States.

A proposed solution:  an autonomous Business Coordinating Mechanism to the HLPF

In response to this institutional gap, the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) as coordinator of the Global Business Alliance (GBA) for 2030 (an umbrella group of major global industry associations and business organizations) has proposed establishing a High Level Political Forum Business Coordinating Mechanism (HLPF/BCM), which it believes will deliver benefits to both governments and the private sector. The HLPF/BCM would operate as an autonomously governed, distinct business representative entity that will serve as a focal point for Member States, offering comprehensive engagement with the full diversity of business expertise that can inform policy discussions on implementing the 2030 Agenda. 

This distinct and separate track for business participation would follow similar successful models of engagement on Financing for Development (FfD) and the Committee on Food Security (CFS), each of which features separate tracks for the private sector and civil society. These institutional arrangements allow these different stakeholder groups to independently represent themselves and would enable business in particular to take full advantage of the opportunities for engagement established by Resolution A/67/290, which addresses the need for an improved and more effective institutional framework for sustainable development, and stresses the importance of increased participation of relevant stakeholders.

Supported by the GBA, the HLPF/BCM would provide a year-round business interface to the relevant stakeholder focal points at the UN that already reach out to the private sector independently of one another, including the Office of the President of the General Assembly; the Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), encompassing both the Division for Sustainable Development (DSD), the Financing for Development (FfD) Office and the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Support office; the UN Global Compact, and other agencies and entities, such as the UN Development Program’s (UNDP) SDG Fund.  Having a single point of contact would help with coordination between all of those internal constituencies and would have dramatic efficiencies for the business community.  Specific to the annual meetings of the HLPF, the HLPF/BCM would:  ensure broad and inclusive business participation in the High Level Political Forum; organize and disseminate annual reports on the contributions of business to the achievement of the SDGs; and promote communication and outreach to expand business awareness and increased understanding of the opportunities presented by the HLPF.

The GBA is already coordinating business engagement in Agenda 2030

Building on ICC’s ECOSOC consultative status at the UN since 1946, the GBA is a deep and broad “talent pool” of expertise and resources for the SDGs.  Its partners encompass major global, regional, national, and sectoral business organizations and associations, as well as companies from multinational corporations to small and medium-sized enterprises around the world, all of whom share a vision for the enabling conditions necessary for sustainable development.  The GBA has a proven track-record of serving as the focal point and interlocutor for business at the United Nations throughout the entire intergovernmental processes related to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.  Through the GBA, business is looking forward to participating in July’s High-level Political Forum (HLPF) and as part of that, to report on business progress on implementation of the SDGs. 

The business community welcomes the chance to be part of this conversation and has repeatedly taken every opportunity offered to it to provide its input to the ongoing formulation of the 2030 Agenda, including during the recent debates on the structure of the follow-up and review process at the global level, where the GBA offered its enthusiastic support for the “Elements Paper” and an annual review of all 17 SDGs through the lens of overarching themes.

We have also already started preparing to provide information at the HLPF about business activities in support of the SDGs.  During the recent High-level Thematic Debate (HLTD) on Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, the United States Council for International Business (USCIB), the U.S. affiliate of the International Chamber of Commerce, explained how its Business for 2030 platform accelerates business community engagement during the implementation of the 2030 Agenda by providing a target-by-target catalogue of private sector initiatives that contribute to sustainable development (currently 140 initiatives by 35 companies in over 150 countries).  These target-level, specific and impact-driven examples can educate others in the private sector about the 2030 Agenda in a practical way and stimulate them to action, simultaneously allowing Member States to ascertain which companies are focused on which goals/targets within their borders as well as neighboring states.  It is our hope that this collection of case studies and other relevant business experiences can be shared through the formal HLPF/BCM, jump-starting priority-setting conversations about implementation at the global and national levels that involve business from the start and thereby hopefully achieve maximum impact.

That is, after all, the goal: “to leave no one behind.”  Over the course of the next 15 years, the UN and a wide range of stakeholders, particularly business, must work together on effective implementation of the wide-reaching 2030 Agenda and it is clear that countries all over the world will depend on their local business communities to help deliver the SDGs.  It is therefore crucial that the private sector have clear, separate recognition in the HLPF process and throughout the UN system, which will make communication and sharing of views more efficient and clear, improving coordination, sharing of best practices and hopefully, scaling-up successful initiatives within and across borders.

Dr. Louise Kantrow is the Permanent Representative to the United Nations' Economic and Social Council for the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), and in that capacity, coordinates the Global Business Alliance for 2030 and the Business Steering Committee on Financing for Development. 

After the 2030 Agenda and SDGs became operable on January 1, 2016, numerous meetings on implementation have taken place at the UN on specific themes, such as indicators, technology and partnerships, and on the monitoring and review processes, and more deliberations are foreseen throughout the year.  This intense and ongoing activity requires business attention and input to ensure that implementation reflects what the private sector can contribute and considers business priorities to help maximize business engagement and inputs. The achievement of the SDGs critically depends on the success of the multi-stakeholder implementation model, so it is essential to invite business into policy dialogues at the national and global levels to help co-create responses to social problems.

Since the UN has placed so much emphasis on a “revitalized” global partnership for sustainable development in the 2030 Agenda, it is imperative to assess and upgrade private sector engagement in the UN system as it takes its first steps toward implementation.  

In our new policy brief, we:   

• Review relative engagement of the private sector in these first steps of implementation, including meetings of the Technology Facilitation Mechanism, the UN Statistical Committee, and the ECOSOC Partnerships Forum.  
• Preview important next steps to come and opportunities for business to be involved, including at the following meetings and critical milestones:
  • ECOSOC Forum on Financing for Development (April 18-21)
  • High-level Thematic Debate on Implementing Commitments on Sustainable Development, Climate Change and Financing (April 21)
  • The Science, Technology and Innovation Forum (June 6-7)
  • High-level Political Forum (July 11-20)

As we document, while there have been some missed opportunities to sufficiently involve business in the first steps of implementation of the 2030 Agenda, there are tremendous opportunities for involving business as a co-equal partner at both the global and national levels. This will require a renewal of the UN’s working methods and executing on the commitment to a renewed partnership for sustainable development, but the business community stands ready to play its part.

Some thoughts on recognizing existing corporate sustainability reporting frameworks within the 2030 Agenda’s follow-up and review mechanisms to galvanize greater business engagement

In the Sustainable Development Summit of September 2015’s outcome document, Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the UN Member States in article 67 “call on all businesses to apply their creativity and innovation to solving sustainable development challenges.” Indeed, that is what business does best -- innovate for problem-solving -- and last year saw major business groups and companies stating their commitment to carry forward 2015’s outcomes. And while SDG target 12.6 “[e]ncourage[s] companies, especially large and transnational companies, to adopt sustainable practices and to integrate sustainability information into their reporting cycle,” business engagement will go far beyond that: nearly every goal and target are relevant to the business community and will no doubt rely on business involvement to be achieved.

If business’ role is now fully recognized (as compared to the approach taken by the Millennium Development Goals), then presumably there is an expectation that these actions - beyond just sustainable practices and product innovations - in all their diversity are to be reported. Yet serious questions remain about how that would work: Where is this information supposed to go and how will it be utilized in the UN system? How will corporate contributions to sustainability - either through core business operations or philanthropic, CSR efforts - be counted on the national and global scale and integrated into ongoing national and global policy decisions on where to focus our collective energies in the 2030 Agenda?

Unfortunately, the UN currently satisfies itself mostly with a handful of recurring private sector speakers providing anecdotes about their company’s contributions - but there is so much more activity going unnoticed in terms of reporting of business contributions to the thematic goals and specific targets which now comprise the SDGs. The UN is frankly not tuned in to the business wavelength.

At the moment, there are no plans to integrate the emergent SDG indicator framework - which aims at tracking Member State progress towards fulfilling the SDGs - with the myriad existing corporate reporting frameworks, which for decades have enabled companies to report on their contributions and impacts on sustainable development. Nor has there been an invitation on behalf of the UN community to adequately recognize the full breadth of the private sector contributions to the SDGs in a more methodical, statistically sophisticated manner. The slight exception has been the inclusion by the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of Business for 2030 as an action network in its Partnerships for SDGs Platform.

This is a substantial missed opportunity. A more formal platform for acknowledgement would dramatically incentivize increased activities from the private sector, and would give true meaning to the notion of a revitalized partnership that lies at the core of the 2030 Agenda.  The power of such a collaborative platform, particularly one paired with existing Official Development Assistance spending, would also enhance our learning about which goals and targets are receiving too much or too little attention in terms of resources and programs so that reprioritization and rebalancing can occur as needed. A good example of the potential of such an approach is on display at the new philanthropy project - SDG Funders - which blends philanthropic donations alongside ODA flows in an accessible and interactive fashion.

Our Business for 2030 catalogue of case studies is a step in the right direction, as it matches company contributions to specific Goals and targets. But this collection is anecdotal and highlights the best of the best in order to demonstrate what is possible to the UN community and to galvanize others in the private sector to take action. What we will need, however, is a big data approach to truly leverage the insights and collective learning that integrating these separate strands of data might yield. There are no doubt technical and likely political complexities to such integration, but the building blocks are in place.

Some initial steps in the right direction

On the business side, corporate reporting on sustainability issues has been dramatically increasing for years. According to the Governance & Accountability institute, over 80 percent of the S&P 500 now files a CSR or sustainability report. In addition, KPMG noted in 2015 that 92 percent of the world’s largest 250 companies produce a CSR or sustainability report.

The trend towards greater reporting on sustainability has had a meteoric curve in recent years, which have seen 180 policies and initiatives on sustainability reporting introduced in 45 countries, roughly two thirds of which are mandatory. All evidence suggests that the trend will continue. For example, the World Federation of Exchanges - the world’s global association for 64 stock exchanges and clearinghouses - recently released a guidance recommending 34 key performance indicators for ESG listing requirements and there are now 38 such exchanges participating in the Sustainable Stock Exchange Initiative.  

Investors continue to respond in kind, with the number of assets under management invested pursuant to socially responsible investment strategies has also increased exponentially in recent years. It would be even better if leading reporting frameworks continued on their trajectory of harmonization so that businesses can reflect what they are a doing in a single, coherent language enabling others to more readily understand their contributions to sustainability and progress on the SDGs.

And what about at the UN? A few initial steps have been taken that could lead towards greater integration, but no one within the UN system has yet stated that as a goal.  For example, the UN has created space for the private sector to participate in the High-Level Political Forum in July 2016, which will be the first accounting of progress on implementation of the SDGs for member states, so there is an opportunity at least for business to share what it is doing - again, anecdotally. In addition, the UN Global Compact, GRI and the WBCSD have jointly created the SDG Compass, which correlates SDG targets to existing corporate reporting frameworks. Another initiative, Measuring What Matters (MWM), is separately seeking to align corporate reporting with the emergent UN SDG framework and even recommended as such to the UN back in 2014. But from a policy and organizational perspective, this integration has yet to be placed on the agenda.

Moving Forward

Over the course of the next fifteen years, and beyond the 2030 Agenda, the business community will play a leading role in mobilizing resources, forming partnerships, and finding innovative ways to alleviate poverty by contributing to economic growth and revolutionizing production processes to be less impactful on and more efficient with our planet’s resources.  Corporate sustainability reporting that is officially recognized -- not mandated, just recognized -- by the United Nations could potentially stimulate increased engagement from the private sector.  At the same time, that reporting needs to reflect and accommodate what business is already disclosing and how.  

Now that we’ve entered the SDGs’ implementation phase, it is time to follow through on the bold ambition for a more collaborative partnership with business; this depends on the UN system becoming attuned to how business tracks and reports its sustainability actions. Member States should evaluate whether current working methods really allow for true partnership and what they could be missing out on by not deepening the private sector’s engagement in policy processes and strategic planning. The SDG indicators are a perfect place to start experimenting with improved working methods.  

Given the ambition and scope, this structure for measuring SDG progress will not be constructed rapidly. The vast multi-level indicator framework will take time to evolve over the 15 year period towards 2030, as knowledge and data availability improve.  

In the spirit of another saying that “well begun is half done,” the very first efforts to enact the 2030 Agenda are quite important. A UN Inter-Agency Expert Group on Sustainable Development Goal indicators (IAEG-SDGs) has taken on the task of developing the framework, which will then be proposed for endorsement by  the UN Statistical Commission during its meetings in early March 2016. After that endorsement, the framework will be presented to the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and the General Assembly for adoption. Going forward, follow-up and review of annual progress at the UN’s High-level Political Forum will be informed by an annual progress report by the Secretary-General in cooperation with the United Nations system, based on the global indicator framework along with data from national statistical systems and information collected at the regional level. The IAEG-SDGs would continue to provide technical support for the implementation of the indicators and monitoring framework over the course of the 2030 Agenda.

Where does the private sector fit into both these complex near and long term efforts? After all, the business community was involved with other stakeholders in weighing in during the negotiations leading to the SDGs themselves. The outcomes of the SDG Summit and the Financing for Development Summit recognize the foundational role businesses all over the world will need to play in order to achieve the vision of the 2030 Agenda. The challenge now is ensuring that business continues to be involved in the implementation process; and the global framework of indicators is at the heart of that process. We explore below how the UN is faring on this front and possible areas for improvement going forward.

No data revolution without business

Mr. John Pullinger, Chair of the Statistical Commission, noted in his speech to the General Assembly on the progress of the SDG indicators’ development that they “will require an unprecedented amount of data to be produced and analysed.” Indeed, the lead-up to the SDG Summit was complemented by a new global dialogue on the data revolution, which has led to a new Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data hosted by the UN Foundation. The Global Partnership brings together over 70 champions that represent the full range of data producers and users critical to harnessing the data revolution for sustainable development. It is led by Governments, companies, civil society organizations, international organizations and statistical and data communities from around the world.

The Global Partnership has an important focus on capacity development, but the UN conversation about what the indicators will be so far continues mainly through the intergovernmental process described above. While the indicator development process at the UN has been transparent and open to feedback from business and other stakeholders via online submissions, opportunities for business to have a meaningful exchange of ideas over the indicators in-person has been somewhat limited as past meetings to discuss the global indicator framework have only allowed limited participation from the business community.

For example, according to the report prepared for the Statistical Commission's March meeting, the open consultation held in Bangkok in December 2015 was attended by “[o]ver 220 participants, including representatives of 24 of the 28 members of the Group, and close to 200 observers, including Member States that are not members of the Group, as well as representatives of international and regional organizations and civil society, academia and the private sector.” Of those non-state actor observers, only 1 of the 56 attendees was from business, and several other business representatives were not allowed to attend.

There are other inputs into the UN Statistical Commission’s work that would benefit from private sector input. For example, a recent UNIDO Report submitted to the Commission mentions its struggles with gathering industrial data in developing countries. The lack of data is deeper than a reporting problem, however; this dearth creates a more fundamental challenge: a drag on the development of industrial policy at national levels since policymakers do not have enough information to formulate policy. A response properly coordinated with the business community could potentially overcome some of these historic capacity issues.

A similar need exists for information and communications technology (ICT) statistics, according to the “Report of the Partnership on Measuring Information and Communications Technology for Development.” Multi-stakeholder approaches in close cooperation with the private sector actors are necessary in order to leverage ICT as a key enabler to development. Furthermore, demands are increasing for reliable governance statistics, according to the Report of the Praia Group. The private sector is rightfully concerned with governance data and business is capable of offering guidance to develop inclusive data collection systems.

Any statistical work involving big data, moreover, will almost necessarily entail engagement with the private sector, as noted by the Secretary-General’s recent Report on Big Data. It is necessary, therefore, to explore long-term partnerships that benefit both the private sector and the UN. To further learning and cooperation on big data, the third International Conference on Big Data for Official Statistics will be held in Dublin in June 2016 to discuss, among other capacity-building topics, “Data access and partnerships: the win-win scenarios.”

The private sector is keen to offer its expertise and the United Nations can catalyze this interest for continued business engagement in support of the SDGs - if business has a true seat at the table. The various processes being considered by the UN Statistical Commission in March beg the question of specific ways in which the private sector and its views can interface with the myriad processes and the Statistical Commission’s work itself. This highlights the need for better coordination and opportunities for input directly to UN bodies in a meaningful way.

This is not just a procedural matter. Clearly, business is expected to implement and resource much of the SDG action in one way or another, so its own tracking, and the kinds of indicators of progress that business identifies and uses need to be reflected somehow in the global framework going forward, and that has to be taken on board sooner rather than later.   

In a future post, we will delve further into business’s own approach to metrics and reporting of sustainability information, and lessons and synergies that are relevant to the global framework.

Throughout the last decade, Africa’s economic growth has been robust.  While this growth is expected to continue during 2016 for sub-Saharan Africa, it will likely not reach the region’s full potential due to ongoing global challenges and under-investment in infrastructure. Doubling-down on implementing infrastructure projects will thus be a critical step in enhancing Africa’s economic climate.

This is why the outcome document of the United Nation’s Financing for Development conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 2015 (the “Addis Ababa Action Agenda”) recognized that key to achieving the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda would be “implementing resilient and environmentally sound infrastructure, including energy, transport, water and sanitation, and sustainable and resilient buildings using local materials.”  Likewise, the Sustainable Development Goals have prioritized infrastructure in its own goal - Goal 9 - reflecting the consensus of the world’s development finance institutions that infrastructure needs to be a priority going forward.  This is the case particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, which faces a $93 billion per year infrastructure gap.   

The question is precisely how infrastructure will get financed. As African governments continue to face diverse financing constraints, which include budgetary restrictions and backlogs of yet-to-be-approved projects, external funding from private and public financial institutions is vital.

But, as Bechtel’s regional president in Africa, Andrew Patterson, notes in a new blog post, governments must be strategic and selective about which projects to focus on and which funding models to use depending on the type of project under consideration. Patterson should know:  Bechtel has extensive experience, having worked in 160 countries and delivered 25, 000 projects.

According to Patterson, ideally, governments should concentrate on about three to five large infrastructure projects per year in order to improve the chances of project delivery. They should also carefully consider who to partner with on what kinds of projects:  there should be a division of labor between public and private finance. Governments should spearhead the large infrastructure projects – major highways, greenfield freight rail, urban light rail, and the initial greenfield port project – because the Public-Private Partnership or Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) models are not well-suited for those major projects due to the presence of project unknowns and associated risks. 

As Patterson explains, it’s all about bankability - and simply a matter of math:  governments can more easily obtain external funding, including export credit that is much cheaper than what private equity firms can offer, and, private institutions require higher contingency reserves for the development phase of projects. This often makes the larger projects no longer bankable. In contrast, private investments should concentrate on projects that are bankable and can rapidly reach financial closure, such as power projects, expanding existing airports and marine ports, and the manufacturing/service industries. 

More fundamentally, African governments will need to rise to the challenge of creating the right enabling environments to welcome in such infrastructure investments, as USCIB has argued in a 2015 policy paper on the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. One practical step is creating a dedicated centralized PPP unit within their governments that can analyze PPP opportunities throughout ministries and sectors, which are perceived as contributing significantly to the accomplishments of a country’s PPP program.  Bechtel has ostensibly played that role in  Gabon, where it helped the government deliver a $25 billion infrastructure plan, including organizing and co-managing the l’Agence Nationale des Grands Travaux, a government agency that oversees the execution and delivery of the plan with various ministries and government agencies. As part of this program, Bechtel supports the government in reviewing and prioritizing the projects for their social and economic benefits, and developing the best delivery model for each individual project.

In sum, infrastructure will be key to achieving the SDGs but governments must take the lead and there are a number of important key policy choices and frameworks they can establish to make funding their infrastructure priorities more achievable. Read Bechtel’s blog here to learn more.

The new TFM has just been officially launched at the UN. The success of the TFM will depend on its ability to bring in meaningful engagement by a variety of stakeholders, especially the private sector. At this early stage, questions remain about whether the TFM is constituted to deliver on its mandate and add value beyond several existing technology bodies at the UN - particularly on the question of its ability to incorporate the views of business.

What is the TFM?

The TFM was launched during the United Nations Summit to adopt the post-2015 development agenda in September 2015.   It also figured prominently as an outcome of the July 2015 Addis Ababa Conference on Financing for Development (see para 123 of Addis Ababa Action Agenda) and has received support from a range of stakeholders as a critical means to promote science, technology, and innovation to advance progress on all of the newly adopted Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). With the launch of the TFM, stakeholders hope to have better access to the technical cooperation necessary to combat climate change, alleviate poverty, and ultimately achieve the SDGs.

Prior to the TFM's launch, an informal working group of several UN agencies, the Word Intellectual Property Organization and the World Bank had led the UN's work on technology facilitation.   Going forward, a new Inter-agency Task Team on Science, Technology and Innovation for the Sustainable Development Goals (IATT) open to every UN agency will work across seven work streams. Among other activities, the IATT will

• Create a collaborative, multi-stakeholder forum on science, technology and innovation for the SDGs
• Create an online platform
• Map existing science, technology and innovation initiatives, conduct background research and develop reports in support of the TFM’s activities
• Carry out a UN capacity building programme on technology facilitation for the SDGs
• Develop partnerships and advance fund raising

These work streams and the current structure of the TFM do combine several of the building blocks that have proven successful in other multilateral technology bodies and initiatives, but a critical component – engagement with the business community – may be underdeveloped in the current structure of the TFM, as discussed below.

Learning lessons from existing technology facilitation mechanisms

In our view, there are some important lessons to learn from previously existing technology facilitation mechanisms – particularly those in the green technology space – that are essential for the TFM to incorporate so that it adds value to already existing initiatives. 

Some of the success factors to be considered for the TFM are exemplified by existing bodies, such as: 

• The Climate Technology Centre & Network (CTCN), which works alongside the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) alongside a consortium of other institutional partners, and
• WIPO Green,  established by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in 2013. 

The CTCN is a satellite organization of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.  CTCN

• facilitates the transfer of climate-friendly technology by providing technical assistance at the request of developing countries,
• creates access to information and knowledge on climate technologies, and
• fosters collaboration between business and academic institutions.

These services address barriers that limit the development and transfer of climate technologies and works to create an enabling environment for innovation and increased investments in climate technology projects. CTCN's demand-driven approach ensures that countries have assessed their own needs first, which also signals the requisite ‘buy-in’ so that technology will be usefully deployed.

WIPO Green is “an interactive marketplace that connects technology and service providers with those seeking innovative solutions.” It is comprised of an online database and network whose members include SMEs, industry associations, intergovernmental organizations, and other stakeholders. Since its inception, WIPO Green has contributed to green technology innovation and transfer in addition to adding greater transparency to the market for green technology.

CTCN, WIPO Green, and other successful technology facilitation approaches share a common thread – strong partnerships with the private sector that leverage the sector’s insight on the factors that enable new technology. It would be a shame if the TFM doesn’t take advantage of the business community's considerable experience or doesn't pay attention to the need for appropriate enabling environments and providing country-specific assistance.

What is the role for the private sector in the TFM?

In launching the TFM, the President of the UN General Assembly, H.E. Mogens Lykketoft, “stressed the importance of having strong participation from the private sector and that the role of the states was to provide the enabling environment for that.” Indeed, business needs to be embedded in the TFM process in order to leverage the resources, including investment, innovation, and know-how, that business can bring towards its implementation.

The main engagement point for business in the TFM would appear to come in the multi-stakeholder 10-Member Group of experts appointed by the Secretary-General to provide ideas, guidance and recommendations to the UN Inter-agency Task Team on Science, Technology and Innovation for the Sustainable Development Goals (IATT) as it carries out its main tasks described above.

This first group of experts serves at the discretion of the Secretary-General, but nominally for an initial two-year term.  Unfortunately, this multi-stakeholder group’s first cohort has  just one business representative – not exactly a proportional number of the represented stakeholders (business, academia and civil society) as was projected by the nascent IATT-STI in its first meeting (noting among other criteria, the need for "balance of representatives of civil society, private sector (including philanthropies), scientific and technological community;").  

Nor is one business representative really proportional to the role and insights business can bring to the discussion. Questions may arise as to exactly how the different perspectives of the vast constituents of the global business community can be adequately represented in the members’ work with such limited representation.

Seeking Supportive Innovation Ecosystems

The Alliance for Clean Technology Innovation (ACTI), has stressed the importance of strong intellectual property (IP) protection to technological innovation and dissemination.  There is no one-size-fits all approach to enabling innovation and investment, and ACTI has argued for targeted, creative policies that are tailored to meet country needs. These elements, in addition to collaboration among governments, multilateral institutions, academia and business, come together to form supportive ecosystems for innovation that are necessary for clean technology innovation to combat global climate change.

One initial development in setting up the TFM is puzzling:  the IATT-STI's first act during its first meeting in October 2015 was to delete the reference to property rights in its Terms of Reference, in order to "avoid possible legal and controversial discussions." The meeting summary notes that "It was highlighted that the principles of intellectual property rights could be treated in other places other than the TORs, if necessary (e.g. any contracts or terms of use related to external products, such as the online platform)." While we do not know what the draft reference to intellectual property rights said, taking the topic off the table entirely is arguably not a step in the right direction.

The outcome documents of the SDGs and the Addis Abba Action Agenda both recognized the need for the 2030 Agenda to forge a “revitalized” global partnership for sustainable development. We hope that as the Inter-agency Task Team moves forward with its work, it will find supplementary ways to get the business community’s perspectives on its various work streams, and in the TFM itself.

References:  

Alliance for Clean Technology Innovation, Climate Change Policies for Clean Technology Innovation and Dissemination (11 May 2009) pp. 2-3.

Fortunately, the SDG process has identified the need to address the challenges of legal identity and informality in multiple places. In Goal 16, Target 16.9 calls on governments to "provide legal identity for all, including birth registration." In addition, Goal 8 calls on governments to "encourage the formalization and growth of micro, small- and medium-sized enterprises," including through access to financial services.

Already in the first months of implementation, this foundational issue is getting the attention it deserves:  the Center for Global Development recently hosted an event on this important topic, entitled How Finding the Missing Millions Can Help Achieve the SDGs, which featured US Special Coordinator for Post-2015 Development Agenda, Tony Pipa, and World Bank Corporate Secretary and President's Special Envoy on the Post-2015 Process, Mahmoud Mohieldin, among others.

The discussion centered on how legal identity must be achieved in order to ensure broader success on many of the SDGs. Identification is key to addressing issues such as gender equality, land rights, and reduction of corruption and inequality - and many of the other goals and targets. The need to formalize economies and economic relationships between employers and the state and between employers and employees has also recently gained attention at the International Labor Organization, which adopted a Recommendation on the topic of informality at its last Conference in June 2015. The Recommendation was featured in an informal dialogue at the UN in September among various stakeholders, including USCIB's Vice President for Labor Affairs, Corporate Responsibility and Governance, Ariel Meyerstein. An enlarged tax base from an expanded formal sector is one of the main sources for the domestic resource mobilization, which will be key to funding other governmental efforts to achieve the SDGs. USCIB also sponsored a session on various approaches to improving working conditions and informality in SMEs at the UN Forum on Business in Human Rights in Geneva in mid-November.

The capacity to capture new forms of legal identity and thus more accurately count populations will also be a major component of the 'data revolution' inspired by the SDGs. This will no doubt be the focus of the new Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, which will have its secretariat at the United Nations Foundation.

In sum, legal identity and informality will be two issues to watch as the UN 2030 Agenda unfolds.

If poverty is not a result of lack of resources or opportunities, but of poor institutions, poor government, and toxic politics, giving money to poor countries — particularly giving money to the governments of poor countries — is likely to perpetuate and prolong poverty, not eliminate it. 

Now that Deaton has won the Nobel for his work on consumption and consumer pricing, poverty and welfare it's perhaps useful to recall this controversy, which also played itself out over the course of the last two years as the UN Member States debated the role of Official Development Assistance (ODA) in the now finalized Sustainable Development Goals and Financing for Development processes, which collectively will frame the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. Developing countries were keen to keep developed countries to their promises in the Monterrey Consensus on ODA, which has stagnated after hitting a high-water mark in 2013. 

A few things are highly relevant about Deaton's life work to the new sustainable development era.  As economist Dani Rodrik noted to the NY Times, “Suppose you wanted to understand the effect of a subsidy on rice on the well-being of farmers. He has produced an approach that you can actually use with household data to trace through the effect of something like this on the well-being of different farmers.”

Although Deaton's work focused on individual's consumption habits, the larger questions here are squarely relevant to the debates about aid and private capital in the 2030 agenda because they have to do with how individuals make choices. As companies look for new ways to produce for and market to potential consumers at the bottom of the pyramid, what is the right amount of public subsidy to make private market pricing for various kinds of so-called 'public goods' and services (at the global and national levels) affordable and therefore sustainable over the long-term?

The other aspect of Deaton' work that is extremely significant to the sustainable development agenda is his focus on the need for better data to track poverty, particularly in developing countries. As Deaton noted in a lecture in 2010 (years before the current 'data revolution' and before the process of the SDGs got underway in Rio+20 and afterward), there are good reasons for "skepticism about our ability to make precise comparisons of living standards between widely different countries such as poor countries in Africa and rich countries in the OECD." This leads to a further reflection by Deaton:

In spite of the attention that they receive, global poverty and inequality measures are arguably of limited interest. Within nations, the procedures for calculating poverty are routinely debated by the public, the press, legislators, academics, and expert committees, and this democratic discussion legitimizes the use of the counts in support of programs of transfers and redistribution. Between nations where there is no supranational authority, poverty counts have no direct redistributive role, and there is little democratic debate by citizens, with discussion largely left to international organizations such as the United Nations and the World Bank, and to non-governmental organizations that focus on international poverty. These organizations regularly use the global counts as arguments for foreign aid and for their own activities, and the data have often been effective in mobilizing giving for poverty alleviation. They may also influence the global strategy of the World Bank, emphasizing some regions or countries as the expense of others. It is less clear that the counts have any direct relevance for those included in them, given that national policymaking and the country operations of the World Bank depend on local, not global poverty measures.

And here we see Deaton's two major strains of significant contributions merge together as we will watch in coming months how the UN Inter-Agency Task Force on Statistics will try to come up with measures both of poverty and inequality within countries and globally and continue the march to "leave no one behind." As the private sector begins to engage with the SDGs, the next fifteen years will also see new experiments in how the private sector can ever more meaningfully engage with the problem of poverty, including through partnerships between large global companies and social entrepreneurs, among other partners. Both the statistics effort and the partnerships will depend on the role of public institutions to create enabling environments and will also rely on more precise measurement to continue to fine-tune approaches. 

Deaton's skepticism about these statistics and the contributions of aid give pause, but as others have recently noted, his criticism does not convincingly rule out all forms of aid in every circumstance; the best response, then, is probably to make aid better, not simply get rid of it. This will include using aid increasingly for 'blended finance' and also to enhance our ability to measure. Exciting things to come.

By Ariel Meyerstein
Vice President, Labor Affairs, Corporate Responsibility & Corporate Governance
United States Council for International Business (www.uscib.org)

UPS, a USCIB member company, posted a synopsis of Abney’s speech on its blog, UPS Longitudes, in which he noted that “[w]e simply cannot continue on our current unsustainable path.” The blog post addresses the changes to partnerships between governments, NGOs, business and the UN necessary to embark on the now adopted UN Sustainable Development Goals.

The importance of connecting business opportunity and societal need is demonstrated by UPS as well as contributors to the Business for 2030 portal. UPS sees one of the greatest opportunities for collaboration in fostering innovation as well as human well-being – in line with Goal 9: Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive & sustainable industrialization, and foster innovation among others of the Sustainable Development Goals.

According to Abney, “[b]usiness has the reach, resources and big-project management skills. It clearly has incentives to create a world that is strong enough, fair enough and healthy enough to support business growth. It is also the nexus for innovation.”

Company contributions to Goal 9 on Business for 2030 thus far include initiatives by Bechtel, PPL, DuPont, TTNet and Google. 

In the post, Meyerstein called for three steps at both the global and national levels:  

• National governments should organize cross-ministry working groups and begin convening stakeholders — including business and civil society — to collaboratively assess and identify their priorities.
• Corporate reporting frameworks should be considered and integrated - or at the least acknowledged - by the official UN indicator processes.  As Meyerstein notes,

[h]ow can we discuss achieving the targets on biodiversity, sustainable consumption and production patterns or financial inclusion without considering corporate reporting on these and other issues? How can we do it without some interaction between ‘official’ member state or U.N. agency statistics and other data?  We would be missing the bulk of the story on a good number of targets and missing a chance to redirect both government and business resources to filling gaps as we identify them along this 15-year journey. 

• Finally, Meyerstein observes that the "crucial question" member states need to answer for business is what the role of the private sector will be in the ongoing intergovernmental discussions about follow-up and review?  He proposes that what is needed is a "more empowered business focal point" for both deliberations and ongoing coordination between sectors.  Such a focal point would be helpful as a resource to both UN agencies and member states looking for the business community's views on pressing issues or seeking partners for projects.  It could also serve a critical role as a liaison for companies looking for guidance through the labyrinth of UN agencies. Such enhanced coordination will be essential to catalyzing more robust and effective partnerships in the next 15 years.

Read more at Devex.

It contains some very candid remarks about the role of MDG 8 in stimulating technology transfer vs. what has naturally occurred globally through the global diffusion of ICT:

Perhaps the most dramatic and unexpected development tracked by the Task Force took place in the global diffusion of information and communications technologies (ICTs) that Goal 8 sought to promote. The spread of mobile telephone subscriptions rose from 10 per cent of the population in developing countries in 2000 to about 90 per cent in 2014. Internet access is lagging (only 32 per cent of the people in these countries have Internet access thus far), but it can be expected to continue to grow rapidly based on the spread of mobile broadband access. It would be inaccurate to claim that inclusion in Goal 8 was responsible for the impressive spread of mobile phone technology. Capable enterprises saw an opportunity for profitable expansion of their industry and, enabled by supportive policy environments, were able to act on that incentive. Equally capable pharmaceutical enterprises did not spread affordable essential medicines throughout the developing world because profit incentives led them in other directions—except in instances where policy pressures and the glare of public opinion had an impact, as in the case of HIV/AIDS medications. Coupled with the observations above on ODA, trade and debt, it is clear that the “partnership” element in the global partnership for development is first and foremost a partnership among States.1 However, it is also clear that mobilized public advocacy has been essential in moving Governments to take direct actions and adopt policy frameworks that may translate into effective means of implementation of the international goals and targets. The Task Force intended that its reports help in this regard.

Definitely worth thinking about carefully as we head into the 2030 sustainable development era and Goal 17 and its proposal for a Technology Facilitation Mechanism.

He looks into how we will come up with metrics on productivity for the following Goals/targets:

• double agricultural productivity by 2030 (2.3);
• achieve higher levels of economic productivity through diversification, technological upgrading and innovation, including through a focus of high-value added and labour-intensive sectors (8.2); and
• promote inclusive and sustainable industrialisation and by 2030 raise industry’s share of employment and gross domestic employment, in line with national circumstances, and double its share in least developed countries (9.2)

Drawing on research underway at the Overseas Development Institute, te Velde offers some initial proposals:

Using labour productivity and its decompositions is a useful step towards an SDG indicator.  One can argue about the appropriate labour productivity target for 2015-2030, but one option would be to extrapolate estimates for sub-Saharan African countries which range between 2-3% annual growth over the last decade, with structural change contributing around 0.75%.

A labour productivity target for the poorest countries will help to set an important signal to countries on the need to transform their economies for sustained job creation. Countries can then use these targets to consider appropriate policies and roles of public and private sector. Our work suggests the following important steps: (i) data analysis; (ii) policy analysis; (iii) policy implementation. These steps could yield important insights, e.g. on how much transformation is really taking place, what are the major constraints and policies for transformation, and how can such policies best be implemented. Thus a productivity target could be a first step in stimulating the right policy and institutional responses, domestic as well as international including development finance institutions.

Read more over at Business Fights Poverty's SDG Zone.

Makower: What do you want to see from the business community going forward in terms of being proactive, being engaged, being authentic and ultimately being impactful?

Mohammed: We already have seen that — the engagement that we've had so far in helping to shape this agenda, both from the financing for development and the goals themselves. We've had engagement that has surprised us, that has gone further than we expected beyond the conversation on corporate social responsibility to really looking at companies’ business models. That has been very useful with Unilever, IKEA and Volvo; so many companies have come to the table on this. I'd like to think that we could scale that up and that businesses at the multinational level would begin to have this conversation with local businesses so that you are really talking about the whole community of business and the private sector.

That's on the side of business that speaks to transforming economies, industrialization and manufacturing. There is the other side of the private sector, which is about insurance, about bringing instruments in to help us on service delivery — for instance, on health and some of the social-protection floors.

Mrs. Mohammed also spoke about implementation and the role of global business organizations, including the International Chamber of Commerce, in facilitating business engagement:

Makower: Tell me a little bit more about how that conversation would take place. I’m guessing that a lot of people reading this who have sustainability leadership positions in companies are saying, "Okay, this sounds like something we should engage in. How should a company approach this?”

Mohammed: We're going to be making much more of an effort now at the country level with the UN country teams to look at the different stakeholders that we will be helping to convene. That's what we'll be doing: helping to facilitate countries to achieve their policy frameworks and the plans they have over the next 20 or 30 years. We hope they use the SDG framework to raise the ambition and bring the partnerships together for a sustainable development pathway.

I see the 17 goals themselves as a pipeline of opportunities for investment. So if we're talking about cities, what will go into that, and what sort of businesses will be the mainstay of it, and how can we begin to broker a conversation with those stakeholders, government and the finance community?

Makower: I’m still not sure I got an answer. Who should a company contact to say, "We want to understand how we can play a role. We have a specific idea we'd like to put forward." Or is it too early?

Mohammed: It's already happening. These conversations and companies are already contacting the Global Compact. They're contacting the International Chamber of Commerce and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. There already are these networks in place, and they're working very hard at brokering these partnerships. What we need to see is how they will scale up and be much more effective on the ground.

Come here Mrs. Mohammed speak directly to the business community at the launch event for Business for 2030.org on September 24, at 3pm at the Harvard Club.

As they explain,

Financing the United Nations’ sustainable development goals (SDGs), for example, will require more than the combined GDP of Africa’s 30 biggest economies in additional funds every year. A big ask – so where should the money come from? Given that the funding needed is nearly 20 times last year’s official international aid flows, it’s safe to say that more aid from international donors cannot continue to be the primary focus.

So what if we tapped into the considerable resources of the developing countries themselves? Often overlooked, these countries’ tax revenues, natural resource revenues, private domestic savings, pension funds, private equity markets, stock markets, and remittances, taken together, are significantly larger than aid flows – and are growing rapidly. If harnessed to finance development, these resources could enormously accelerate the rate at which the SDGs are achieved.

Read more of this insightful piece here.

- Karmenu Vella, European Commissioner for Environment, Maritime Affairs and Fisheries

UN member states are in the final stretch of their deliberations to finalize the UN post-2015 development agenda, an ambitious global blueprint to guide sustainable development planning and implementation across the UN and at the national level.  This global agenda will apply to all countries, and while governments are primarily responsible for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), it is expected that government will fully engage all societal partners for help in implementation. 

From a business standpoint, this marked shift in orientation towards the private sector is long overdue and reflects our on-the-ground experience, particularly in developing countries: governments alone are not enough to address the critical challenges of sustainable development, nor can the public, business and philanthropic sectors achieve their maximum potential operating in isolation from one another.

This was the conclusion of a July side event in New York on substantive engagement for stakeholders in the post-2015 development agenda, organized by the EU European Economic and Social Committee, the Delegation of the European Union to the UN and the UN Department for Economic and Social Affairs. Government and civil society speakers all presented several versions of what was essentially the same clear message:  the post-2015 agenda will not meet its ambitious aims without a dedicated “space” for business and civil society, including involvement in formulating and implementing goals at the international and national levels.

Chaired by Nikhil Seth (Director, Division for Sustainable Development, UN Division of Economic and Social Affairs), with the participation of Karmenu Vella (European Commissioner for Environment, Maritime Affairs and Fisheries), and Ibrahim Thiaw (Deputy Executive Director, UN Environmental Program), the session was held during the UN’s High-Level Political Forum – an annual review of progress on sustainable development initiated at the Rio+20 Conference in 2012.  The side event invited views from NGO, union, farmers and youth representatives.

In my comments as a business representative to this discussion, I offered simple principles for building the interface with non-state actors, beginning with business:

•       Pursue an “all-hands-on-deck” approach: For business, that means UN agencies and national governments should invite all sectors, sizes and nationalities of the business community to the table without discriminating between different industries or their perceived relative contributions to sustainable development. We need all companies to strive towards more sustainable practices, and leaving whole industries out of the conversation misses an opportunity for meaningful exchange of ideas and wider dissemination of good practices. If there is a “will” demonstrated by individual companies or industries to engage in the Post-2015 Development Agenda, the UN and governments should create a “way” to involve them.

•       Encourage and recognize input across the entire life cycle of inter-governmental policy development, including priority-setting, policy formation and implementation: Bringing in the private sector or other stakeholders only for implementation and tracking of existing policies is too little, too late. This is relevant across all levels of policy formulation – global, regional and national.

•       There must be a clearly recognized process for business and other stakeholders to contribute meaningfully to intergovernmental processes:  It is not enough to create “a space” for stakeholders. Business and other stakeholders will bring their best efforts and representatives if they know the input will be heard and reflected through official channels. Recognition of official advisory groups representing business, labor and other elements of civil society is a tried and true element of many intergovernmental efforts, including the ILO and the OECD.   

•       A sufficiently well-resourced institutional infrastructure for engagement is vital to sustain and build the contributions of the private sector and civil society.   Too often, the stakeholder role is an afterthought, lacking enough staff support and institutional influence to be effective.

•       Make it easy and user-friendly: Layers of unnecessary bureaucracy and criteria for non-state actors to engage in deliberations wastes time and resources and discourages involvement.

•       To make the post-2015 development agenda reach its potential, governments need to plan and provide resources and add value to catalyze voluntary efforts and partnerships.  This could take the form of sharing good practices, capacity-building and other ways to encourage non-state entities to help governments shoulder their burdens.

•       Recognize the unique traits of various constituencies and do not force consensus or one-size-fits all – the objective should be to combine multistakeholder efforts and dialogue with constituency-specific inputs and initiatives. For example, while the EU Economic and Social Committee provides a forum for joint effort and discussion across stakeholders, it also allows channels for single constituencies to offer their specific views and initiatives.  The UN Post-2015 Development Agenda and HLPF follow-up should accommodate this same flexibility for policy dialogue and implementation. 

•       Involve not only leadership – as important as that is – but also experts and practitioners: While CEOs are important leadership messengers, much of the ongoing work and innovation depends on the involvement of and dialogue with experts and executives engaged in business operations on a daily basis from there is a tremendous amount to learn.

In his closing comments, EU Environment Commissioner Vella also pointed to the impact businesses can make through concepts such as social responsibility and green economy in improving resource efficiency, providing funding for infrastructure and protecting biodiversity.  This potential for supportive business impact has been born out in the recently concluded 3rd International Conference on Financing for Development, which works with a recognized Business Steering Committee to provide business involvement in discussions and demonstrate how companies are stepping up to advance sustainable development. 

Last month in San Francisco, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon urged the private sector “to take its place at the table and plot a path forward for the next 15 years, reaffirming once again that responsible business is a force for good.” Business is very diverse, made up of enterprises of all sectors, sizes and nationalities.  This diversity is a resource of solutions as broad as the SDGs themselves.  

Ultimately, a substantive role for business as a partner and solutions provider should be reflected in each SDG and made actionable through a recognized interface and role in the Post-2015 Development Agenda at both international and national levels. The post-2015 development era’s mandate to “leave no one behind” is too important – and too challenging – for any one sector to achieve on its own. We need more coordination and cooperation if we are to collectively achieve this ambitious and transformational vision for humanity by 2030.

Norine Kennedy, Vice President, Environment, Energy and Strategic International Engagement, United States Council for International Business

The side event highlighted Ericsson’s research, which shows that while 70% of the world’s population will have a smart phone in 2020, access to 3G/4G data networks is still severely limited in developing regions (Africa and the Middle East currently have only 20% penetration of 3G/4G). At the same time, much of the innovation in digital finance has started in Africa, so one can only imagine what will happen as broadband access in these regions climbs to 70% in the coming year.

In fact, significant progress is currently being made in digital finance, such as the rapid spread of mobile banking, which as The World Banks reports, reduced the unbanked population from 2.5 billion to 700 million between 2011 and 2014. The panelists agreed that various actors, particularly banks and telecom services, must work together to create a network of partnerships (or financial “ecosystems”) that will drive development of the sector. Weidman-Grunewald also calls for “standardization and interoperability” between borders and technologies and the need to ensure secure and private transactions. She ends her post by emphasizing public-private cooperation: “Private sector innovation and scale were the themes of the day, but we also need models that meet development goals and are commercially viable.”

Improving private sector participation would accelerate progress on the sustainable development goals. Unfortunately, as there were only six business representatives out of hundreds of UN and government officials at each of the three UN General Assembly “round tables,” it is clear that the private sector’s role in the development agenda has yet to be fully recognized.

Indeed, as Weidman-Grunewald observed in a second post from Addis about the Business Forum organized by the Business Sector Steering Committee for Financing for Development, the private sector is “far from leveraged.” However, she is still hopeful, as there is an emerging consensus that it has a tremendous role to play and that “governments could make positive impacts on their development agendas” if ODA and government finance came in “where the innovation potential exists but struggles to achieve scale.” 

Read both of Elaine’s posts here and more about Ericsson’s approach to sustainability here. 

In a letter to Ambassador Lisa Kubiske of the U.S. State Department, dated July 7, USCIB’s President and CEO, Peter Robinson stated that a successful FfD3 would “amplify the opportunity to catalyze private initiative and investment to advance sustainable development and economic growth.  It will be actionable and practical for governments and business; it will synergize with the global market place and provide opportunities to advance entrepreneurship in support of shared prosperity.”  In that letter, Robinson also raised USCIB’s concerns with some aspects of the Addis outcome, relating to taxation and the proposed technology facilitation mechanism in terms of its role vis-à-vis protection of intellectual property.

USCIB played a central role in marshaling business input into FfD3, having worked actively with members and the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) to ensure that the private sector’s voice was heard in Addis. USCIB and its members have engaged on several occasions with the U.S. negotiating team, and USCIB Vice President Ariel Meyerstein met with the co-facilitators of the FfD3 process as part of the Business Steering Committee for Financing for Development, chaired by the ICC Permanent Representative to the UN, Louise Kantrow.

USCIB was instrumental in organizing the conference’s landmark Business Forum on July 14. USCIB lined up an impressive array of member speakers for the business forum to share their insights about investing in emerging markets, including Jay Collins, vice chairman of corporate investment banking at Citi; Peter Sullivan, head of the Africa public sector group at Citi; Walt M. MacNee, executive vice chairman of MasterCard; Elaine Weidman, vice president for sustainability and corporate responsibility at Ericsson; and Jay Ireland, CEO of GE Africa.

“We welcome the Addis agreement as an important step towards realizing a more sustainable and prosperous future for us all,” said International Chamber of Commerce Secretary General John Danilovich. “By establishing a framework that seeks to harness private sector investment, we’ve seen a major leap forward in the international community’s approach to development cooperation.” (Read ICC Secretary General John Danilovich’s letter to the Financial Times on enabling trade for development.)

The private sector and other development institutions and donor countries led the way in a number of areas that went far beyond the confines of the Outcome Document. Several blended finance initiatives were announced, including the Sustainable Development Investment Partnership, which will try to unlock private capital for development, and Convergence, an online platform for developing a pipeline of projects ripe for investment and the exchange of information and capacity building. In addition, the European Union announced that it would add $2.8 billion to Power Africa, an initiative spearheaded by the U.S. government and private sector companies and other partners in sub-Saharan Africa to add more than 30,000 megawatts (MW) of cleaner, more efficient electricity generation capacity as well as increase electricity access by adding 60 million new home and business connections. Other major international financial institutions announced plans to make $400 billion available in the next three years to finance the sustainable development goals.

The conference also provided some cliffhanging moments of concern to business as a proposal by developing countries to elevate the UN tax committee to an intergovernmental body with universal membership nearly brought the conference to a stalemate. The proposal was ultimately rejected, but some in civil society were disappointed with that outcome and along with some governments, can be expected to continue to press for such an upgrade to be reconsidered during the remaining negotiations leading to the UN General Assembly and Post 2015 Summit in September. Significantly, a number of global initiatives were launched to improve the capacity of national tax authorities because taxation is a key aspect of domestic resource mobilization – one of the key resource streams for financing development that could surpass the revenue streams from both foreign direct investment and official development assistance (ODA). These initiatives included the launch of the OECD’s Tax Collectors Beyond Borders Project (a joint venture of the UN Development Program and the OECD) and the Addis Tax Initiative (an effort by 18 developed countries, including the United States, to double official development assistance for tax authority capacity) and a joint World Bank/IMF initiative to provide capacity building for tax authorities in developing countries.

USCIB’s SDG Working Group, chaired by Tam Nguyen (Bechtel) and Brian Lowry (Monsanto), will continue to weigh in to the UN and the administration on USCIB member interests as the UN process continues to deliberate on a wide range of business issues and implementation.  In addition, USCIB has created an online platform to showcase the private sector’s continuing contributions to sustainable development, and demonstrates the many ongoing business initiatives in support of the UN’s Post-2015 Development Agenda. Visit businessforpost-2015.org to learn more.

As one of its justifications for a UN tax body, the Guardian piece says that "global tax standards are decided behind closed doors at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) - also known as the "rich countries' club".  But this caricature obscures the extensive developing country consultation that has occurred throughout the BEPs Project.

Beyond the 34 OECD member countries, 14 countries from a cross-section of regions and per capita income-levels directly participate in the Committee on Fiscal Affairs and the Working Party on meetings on the BEPs Project:  Albania, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Croatia, Georgia, Jamaica, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Peru, Philippines, Senegal, Tunisia, and Vietnam.  In addition, two regional tax organizations - the African Tax Administration Forum (ATAF) and the Inter-American Centre for Tax Administration (CIAT) are also directly involved in the BEPs Project. Through this direct involvement in the project, countries are able to provide input at the working and the decision-making levels to ensure their specific concerns are taken into account.

Moreover, a large number of developing countries have also been consulted extensively through a combination of regional and global high-level policy dialogues. Over 80 developing countries and other non-OECD/non-G20 economies have been consulted in the first year of the Project through four in-depth regional consultations and five thematic global fora, attended by more than 110 jurisdictions and a number of representatives from civil society and the business community.  The OECD coordinating work on a Multilateral Instrument to Modify Bilateral Tax Treaties has also been very broad.

What the Guardian piece also fails to note is that these supposed "closed-door" consultations also make make public all comments received on the various BEPs Action Items.  The current UN tax committee does not seem to have the same robust stakeholder engagement mechanisms and it is unclear how an upgraded body would function in this regard.

We need to work with the facts before creating new global mechanisms of any kind.  The June 25, 2015 draft of the Outcome Document for the Financing for Development Conference appears to be on the right track on this point:  it "welcomes" the work of the BEPs Project and at the same time calls for enhanced support of the existing UN Committee of Experts on International Tax Matters, including by doubling its meeting schedule and improving its engagement with members of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). Enhanced coordination between the UN tax committee and the BEPs Project would also be welcome, but we should not be too hasty to discount how inclusive the BEPs Project truly is.

Read it here on the D.Blog from Dalberg.

To prepare for these consultations, the United Nations General Assembly President, Sam Kutesa, has released a Concept Note exploring the issue.  The note identifies financial resources, technology development and transfer and capacity building as critical MOI to deliver a "truly transformative and ambitious post-2015 development agenda."

According to the Concept Note, the debate will focus on six areas:

(1) actions needed to scale up mobilization of financial resources from all sources, including domestic and international public and private financing, such as official development assistance (ODA), foreign direct investment (FDI) and remittances, trade and partnerships;

(2) requirements to improve efficiency and effectiveness in the use of available resources for sustainable development;

(3) how to foster coherence and a common understanding for robust MOI and the financing for development (FfD) processes and the contribution of trade in renewing global partnerships for development;

(4) measures to develop a financial architecture to incentivize public and private savings towards sustainable development investments;

(5) options for a technology facilitation mechanism; and measures and actions to further build and strengthen developing country capacity, in particular to ensure an effective domestic enabling environment and enhance their ability to implement the post-2015 agenda.
 

For more: http://sd.iisd.org/news/unga-president-releases-concept-note-on-means-of-implementation/
 

On December 4, 2014, the Secretary-General submitted a synthesis report to the General Assembly, titled "The Road to Dignity by 2030: Ending Poverty, Transforming All Lives and Protecting the Planet," which set out his views on the key inputs and framework for the coming post-2015 Development Agenda outcomes.

Significantly, the Report emphasizes a number of messages that the Business for Post-2015 community has prioritized, noting that people across the world are underscoring the need "for democracy, rule of law, civic space and more effective governance and capable institutions; for new and innovative partnerships, including with responsible business and effective local authorities; and for a data revolution, rigorous accountability mechanisms, and renewed global partnerships"  (paragraph 23).

Acknowledgment that business already innovating for sustainable development and stands ready to contribute more, given appropriate enabling environments

The report also recognizes that the private sector stands ready to make a significant contribution to the sustainable development project, if the proper governance structures and incentives are put in place.  According to the Synthesis Report, "forward- looking companies are taking the lead by transforming their business models for sustainable development, and that we have only scratched the surface of the potential for ethics-driven investment by the private sector. With the right incentives, policies, regulations and monitoring, great opportunities couldRio abound" (paragraph 31).

Report proposes a new framing of goals and targets that reflects the "ambition of a universal and transformative agenda" and that will inspire partnerships and mobilize essential actors

The Synthesis Report also proposes a new over-arching framing of the Open Working Group's draft Sustainable Development Goals to make them more readily understood and more likely to inspire action, or, as the Report states to "frame the goals and targets in a way that reflects the ambition of a universal and transformative agenda."  According to the Report, 

Success will equally depend on the power of the new agenda to inspire and mobilize essential actors, new partnerships, key constituencies, and the broader global citizenry. For this, we will need an agenda that resonates with the experiences and needs of people, that can be understood, and embraced. The agenda and goals should also be received at the country level in a way that would ensure a transition of the MDGs to the broader and more transformative sustainable development agenda and effectively become an integral part of national and regional visions and plans" (paragraph 61).

Recalling the Rio+20 Outcome document ("A Future We Want"), the Synthesis Report states that the Member States mandate is that the "SDGs should be action-oriented, concise and easy to communicate, limited in number, aspirational, global in nature and universally applicable to all countries while taking into account different national realities, capacities and levels of development and respecting national policies and priorities" (paragraph 62, quoting para. 247 of "Future We Want").

To implement this vision, the Synthesis Report proposes the following over-arching framework into which the current draft goals and targets could be organized:

Dignity: to end poverty and fight inequalities 

People: to ensure healthy lives, knowledge, and the inclusion of women and children 

Prosperity: to grow a strong, inclusive, and transformative economy 

Planet: to protect our ecosystems for all societies and our children 

Justice: to promote safe and peaceful societies, and strong institutions  

Partnership: to catalyse global solidarity for sustainable development 

Report emphasizes the need to stimulate private flows to achieve the post-2015 agenda

The Synthesis Report also offers its views on the essential work of the Finance for Development agenda and emphasizes the crucial need to bring in private flows to fund the SDG process:

"Urgent action is needed to mobilize, redirect, and unlock the transformative power of trillions of dollars of private resources to deliver on sustainable development objectives. Long-term investments, including foreign direct investment (FDI), are needed in critical sectors, especially in developing countries. These include sustainable energy, infrastructure and transport, as well as information and communications technologies. The public sector will need to set a clear direction. Review and monitoring frameworks, regulations and incentive structures that enable such investments must be retooled to attract investments and reinforce sustainable development. National oversight mechanisms such as supreme audit institutions and oversight functions by legislature should be strengthened" (paragraph 92).

The Report also calls for "[e]fforts to increase the effectiveness of development cooperation need to be enhanced based on basic principles of country ownership, results focus, inclusive partnerships, transparency and accountability." (paragraph 93).

In Part 2 of this review (still to come), we review the Synthesis Report's recommendations on Finance for Development, metrics, technology and other elements.