STUDY SUMMARY

1) Sustainable development: satisfying the needs of the present generation without compromising
the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

2) Why we need to talk about sustainability in business:

• Urgency
• Relevance for business: market opportunity
• Affordability
• Response to global challenges
• Shared values

3) Objectives of SDG’S:

• Equality
• Sustainability

4) Sustainable Development Goals alignments issues:

• Transparency: complexity of landscapes and proliferation of standards, opacity of methodologies

and asymmetry of information.
• Accountability: growing risk of sdg’s washing (reporting-weak legal req., rating-nonfinancial
performance are excluded and most of example are self-declaratory or voluntary)
• Coherence: support to misalignment, no incentives/rewards/sanctions, regulators to catch up
with markets and public resources do not leverage nor innovative enough.

5) Enable actions to respond the issues:

• Policies: regulatory forward guidance, non-financial results reporting and phasing-out support to
misalignment.
• Standards: harmonization of standards, transparency of sharing and best practices, corporate and
finance duties.
• Tools: to leverage impacts (resource mobilization and capacity building, quality of financing and
sdg’s impacts, reduction of leakages align the investment chain.
6) Sustainable finance: the process of taking due account of environmental, social and governance
(ESG) considerations.

7) Impact financing: investment strategy that aims to generate specific beneficial social or
environmental effects in addition to financial gains.

8) Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN): Global Impact Investing Network, more than 88% of
impact investors reported that their investments met or exceeded their expectations.

1) For business, sustainability means:

• Sustainability is improving the quality of human life while living within the carrying
capacity of supporting eco systems.

2) Business goal is to create value. Before the main objective was the shareholders
(Friedman) and now is more for the stakeholders (Freeman).

3) In 1997, was created the triple bottom line (People/Planet/Profit).

4) Justifications for corporate social responsibility:

• Moral obligation
• License to operate
• Reputation
• Sustainability

5) Sustainability helps the company performance by innovation.

6) Addams model has three parts:

• Operational optimization (eco-efficiency): doing the same things better.
• Organizational transformation (New market opportunities): doing good by doing
new things.
• Systems building (societal net changes): doing good by doing new things with
others.

7) The SDG’s help companies because they enable to better manage their risks, anticipate
consumer demand, build positions in growth markets, secure access to needed resources
and strengthen the supply chains.
8) Based on the Ellen MacArthur Foundation report, circular economy aims to redefine
growth, focused more on a positive society-wide benefits. The basis consumption of this
theory is about finite resources and designing waste out of the system. (Foundation,
2019)

9) This theory has three main principles: design out waste and pollution, keep products and
materials in use, and regenerate natural systems. Using the economic theory, circular
economy still respects the work at all scales. In other words, the collaboration of small
and large enterprise’s, countries, cities, local communities and every human being
around. (Phipps, 2019)
Bibliography
Foundation, E. M. (2019). Cities and Circular Economy for Food. Cowes: Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

Phipps, L. (2019, July 29). GreenBiz. Retrieved from GreenBiz:

https://www.greenbiz.com/article/impossible-burger-circular