Insights

Many organisations know about the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – the 17 goals adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015 as an urgent call to action for peace, prosperity and environmental preservation. But few have heard about the SDG Impact Standards – a management framework that can help organisations manage their contribution towards the SDGs and sustainability more broadly.

In this article, we explore the benefits of the Impact Standards and how to use them.

About the Impact Standards

The SDG Impact Standards assist organisations and investors to embed sustainability and the SDGs into their practices. They are management standards that support more informed and accountable internal decision making and action in line with achieving the SDGs and other sustainable development outcomes.

While disclosure is one action within the Impact Standards, they are not reporting standards. They have been designed to complement reporting standards like the Global Reporting Initiative Reporting Standards, the IFRS Sustainability Standards and The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures. They do this by establishing practices which lead to better decisions and ultimately better outcomes, thereby bringing more credibility to sustainability reporting.

The four SDG Impact Standards published by the United Nations Development Programme to guide organisations and investors on how to integrate sustainability into decision making.

Using the SDG Impact Standards

The SDG Impact Standards are organised around four Themes – strategy, management approach, transparency and governance. Each theme contains more specific Actions, and Practice Indicators to guide establishing management practices and identifying improvement opportunities.

The Strategy theme, as an example, contains five Actions. One of these Actions is Understand, which contains four Practice Indicators as outlined in the figure below. Each of the 12 Actions has between two and six Practice Indicators (which can all be found in the self-assessment tool referred to later in this article).

The example below is taken from the Impact Standards for Enterprises, with the Private Equity Fund and Bond Issuers following a similar structure.

The SDG Impact Standard for Enterprises provides Themes, Actions and Practice Indicators. Practice Indicators for Action 2 Understand are provided as an example.

Where to start? Assess your organisation

The best place to start using the SDG Impact Standards is to assess your organisation’s current approaches against the Practice Indicators. The self-assessment tool (available to download from the SDG Impact Standards website) provides all the Themes, Actions and Practice Indicators, with questions to identify your current status and prioritise future improvements.

At Think Impact, we’ve enhanced the functionality of the self-assessment tool so that it produces a visual report of status, easily highlighting current strengths and gaps to strategically prioritise future action to embed sustainability.

Strengths and gaps identified using the SDG Impact Standards self-assessment tool.

Find out more

Contact Rebecca Cain, Think Impact’s Accredited Trainer for the SDG Impact Standards, to find out more: email rebecca@thinkimpact.com.au.

Visit the SDG Impact Standards website for more resources.