The United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) – the world’s largest corporate initiative on sustainability, so far mobilizing more than 12,000 companies across 160 countries - held its most recent “Leaders’ Summit” on June 15 and 16, 2021.
This year’s summit took place online and brought together a wide range of stakeholders, including the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, numerous CEOs of major corporations, as well as government ministers, activists and representatives of civil society organisations from virtually every corner of the globe.
What emerged from event is the typical picture – or dilemma - of a “half full, half empty” glass. Several reasons for optimism were highlighted at the summit: it was encouraging to see, for instance, how the UNGC movement has clearly been gaining momentum among its core target participants, i.e. corporations committed to align their operations with principles of sustainability and to facilitate the successful pursuit of the UN’s 2030 Agenda, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Paris Agreement.
The private sector as a whole – from MNCs to SMEs – is apparently finally realizing that sustainability can be very good for business: consumer and workforce attitudes, in fact, have been consistently evolving in this sense. In multiple sectors, resource management challenges – from dwindling raw materials to linear models producing giant, troublesome piles of waste and inefficient energy consumption patterns – have long started to impose a decisive change of direction, a circular one, that, besides profit, happens to also benefit other “bottom lines”, like people and planet as well. Moreover, in support of the “transition”, innovative solutions are increasingly becoming technologically feasible and economically viable, while financial instruments like “green” bonds and loans are more and more available.
What’s still missing then? What are the macro-areas where intervention is needed to bridge a rather significant gap that’s clearly still perceivable between action and aspiration?
First of all, an intense acceleration of decarbonization patterns - especially in energy-intensive sectors and in OECD economies – appears necessary if we wish to preserve a minimal chance to contain the temperature increase within the 1.5°C threshold beyond which consequences – and costs – would be dramatically more unpredictable and pervasive. This requires rigorous, accountable, science-based approaches that lead the way in establishing not only ideal long-term goals, but also concrete, closely monitored interim targets that can promptly inform the policy calibrations necessary to concretely attempt the halving of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.
At the same time, making sustainability processes more inclusive by building capacity via increased access to both financing and technology is essential for the vast Global South to become an even more integral, active contributor to the transformation that the planet - the one and only planet at our species’ disposal – desperately needs.
Essential to bridge these gaps is public governance, at both national and international levels, given its crucial power to establish enabling and effective legislative ecosystems for the private sector to operate in. The current global challenges call for unprecedented levels of global cooperation, the likes of which, regrettably, we haven’t seen during the present COVID-19 pandemic – a sudden yet not completely unprecedented or unpredictable public health crisis that is closely related to the underlying environmental crises of our time, including biodiversity loss, deforestation, pollution, resource depletion and climate change.
Conducive, bold political leadership is a fundamental dimension of sustainable progress, but this must be supported by an “evolved mindset” across a wider society capable of acknowledging the changing priorities, of revising the traditional “social contract” accordingly, and of implementing - even “embodying” - the very change that policies may aim at. The need for such social mobilization and awareness stresses, of course, also the critical role that sustainability education and communication play throughout.
The COP26 in Glasgow in November 2021, as well as the successful implementation of the recently-released UNGC 2021-23 Strategy, represent the closest yet somewhat already unmissable chances to match justified ambitions with much needed global action.
[This piece is a product of the “GAD-CBCGDF Sustainability Leadership Platform”, a cooperation scheme established between the Globalisation and Development (GAD) Programme of Beijing Normal University-Hong Kong Baptist University United International College (BNU-HKBU UIC) and CBCGDF]
By Dr. Edoardo Monaco – Head of Delegation to UNGC Leaders’ Summit, GAD-CBCGDF Sustainability Leadership Platform
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