Methodology for setting corporate sustainability targets

Abstract

Setting realistic but challenging sustainability targets is critical for motivating business plan changes and guiding corporations toward meaningful contributions to sustainable development and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, aside from the conceptual barriers to sustainability, as well as its universalization and materialization, which make defining sustainability targets difficult, there are few tools for setting such targets, and those that do exist are usually theme-specific. Therefore, this paper proposes a methodology for setting corporate sustainability targets that is free of thematic constraints and based on the integration of Operational Research methods Data Envelopment Analysis, cluster analysis, time series forecasting, and Goal Programming. An application for defining energy and water consumption targets related to SDGs 6, 7, 8, and 12 is presented for a Brazilian electricity company and its nine business units. As a result, more challenging-yet-achievable targets were set for the company and its business units based on data, benchmarking, and the assessment of its decision-makers.