September 19, New York – Following the United Nations Global Compact’s CEO Private Sector Forum in New York, Earth Security and SABMiller, the global beer group, convened a dialogue to release and discuss the SDG Self-Assessment Tool, which Earth Security and SABMiller have developed in cooperation.
One year on from the launch of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), engagement of companies has not been uniform or universal, in part due to the fact that the goals’ targets are not framed in a way that encourages business implementation. The SDGs Self-Assessment Tool enables businesses to see that the development issues covered by the SDGs are crucial to the future of their companies. The tool translates the language of the 169 SDG targets in a way that companies can understand and across factors that are individually relevant to them.
Of this collaboration and the BIT in action, SABMiller Director of Sustainable Development, Anna Swaithes said: “For the first time, the world has an agreed set of development goals which apply to every single country and to every single sector. We made a very conscious choice to align Prosper, our sustainable development strategy, to the SDGs as well as to our commercial objectives. Developing this tool has enabled us to better understand and articulate our strategic challenges and the opportunities to deliver commercial and development impact – I hope that it will help others do the same.”
Taking a step further from conventional thinking about how business can contribute to the SDGs, the tool highlights the material opportunities and potential challenges that key development issues pose to a company’s operations, social license to operate, and ability to grow. It enables companies to assess, in a very practical way, how sustainable development connects to these business imperatives, and why it should be seen as a fundamental driver of business growth. The tool is now available for all companies to use.
Over the past year, Earth Security has worked with SABMiller on its analysis of the relationship between the company’s strategy and the SDGs. This process evolved into the creation of the tool, meaning it was developed in a ‘live’ business context. A report published alongside the tool uses SABMiller’s analysis highlighting the nexus between the four business dimensions of the Tool and the top SDGs applicable to SABMiller at a global level and in one key market, Colombia.
Of the report’s release, Earth Security's Chief Executive Officer, Alejandro Litovsky commented: “a no-nonsense understanding of how unsustainable forms of development affect a company’s costs is now critical; its relationships; the opportunities to innovate and grow; and the political setting in which it operates, in order to change the conversation on the role of business as a key driver of the 2030 agenda.”
About SABMiller: SABMiller is a FTSE-10 company, with shares trading on the London Stock Exchange, and a secondary listing on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange. The group employs around 69,000 people in more than 80 countries, from Australia to Zambia, Colombia to the Czech Republic, and South Africa to the USA. Every minute of every day, more than 140,000 bottles of SABMiller beer are sold around the world. In the year ended 31 March 2016, SABMiller sold 331 million hectolitres of lager, soft drinks and other alcoholic beverages, generating group net producer revenue of US$24,149 million and EBITA of US$5,810 million.
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