Abstract
Approved by the UN General Assembly on 25th September 2015, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which includes a set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals, explicitly invoking the need for joint action among the institutional and business spheres along with civil society, challenge the business world to review its strategic and operational decisions in order to seize the opportunities that can result from a concrete commitment to the promotion of a new development model based on the paradigms of economic, social and environmental sustainability. Business leaders have declared that they are ready to accept the mandate to act as global development actors and have already started to work on this direction. Nevertheless, in order to succeed, several extremely important challenges have to be faced. In this chapter, we explore the role of the private sector in shaping the 2030 Agenda, focusing on challenges and opportunities for business in playing its role of development actor.
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Notes
- 1.
An ecosystem is a dynamic complex of plants, animals, microbes, and physical environmental features that interact with one another. Ecosystem services are the benefits that humans obtain from ecosystems, and they are produced by interactions within the ecosystem. Ecosystems like forests, grasslands, mangroves, and urban areas provide different services to society. These include provisioning, regulating, and cultural services that directly affect people. They also include supporting services needed to maintain all other services.
- 2.
Oxfam is an international confederation of charitable organizations focused on the alleviation of global poverty. It is composed of 20 organizations working together with partners and local communities in more than 90 countries (www.oxfam.org).
- 3.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is an international environmental treaty adopted on May 9, 1992 and opened for signature at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro (1992). It then entered into force on 21 March 1994, after a sufficient number of countries (also named parties) had ratified it. The UNFCCC objective is to “stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”. The UNFCCC has 197 parties as of December 2015. The parties to the convention have met annually from 1995 in Conferences of the Parties (COP) to assess progress in dealing with climate change . In 2015, all (then) 196 then parties to the convention came together for the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris 30 November – 12 December and adopted by consensus the Paris Agreement.
- 4.
The UNGC is the world’s largest corporate sustainability initiative, helping to align business with Ten Principles on human rights, labour, environment and anti-corruption, and to catalyse actions in support of broader UN goals. Launched in 2000, it counts over 8700 signatories based in more than 135 countries (www.unglobalcompact.org).
- 5.
The UN Guiding Principles, proposed by the then-UN Special Representative on Business and Human Rights, John Ruggie, and endorsed by the UN Human Rights Council in June 2011 act as a guide for business on human rights (http://business-humanrights.org/en/un-guiding-principles).
- 6.
KPMG and the UNGC have developed a series of SDG Industry Matrix publications that provide case studies of shared value opportunities for contributing to achieving the SDGs across Financial Services; Industry Manufacturing; Healthcare & Life Sciences; Food , Beverage and Consumer Goods; Transportation; and Energy , Natural Resources and Chemicals (www.unglobalcompact.org/library/3111).
- 7.
Among other initiatives, the UNGC, Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) have developed, for example, a platform for understanding how to implement the SDGs (the “SDG Compass Project”) which features an interactive tool showing how GRI reporting and other corporate reporting intersect with the SDG targets.
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Frey, M., Sabbatino, A. (2018). The Role of the Private Sector in Global Sustainable Development: The UN 2030 Agenda. In: Grigore, G., Stancu, A., McQueen, D. (eds) Corporate Responsibility and Digital Communities. Palgrave Studies in Governance, Leadership and Responsibility. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63480-7_10
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