New measures on contribution of corporations towards sustainability

Abstract

With the UN General Assembly’s adoption in September 2015 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be reached in 2030 a new, overarching and prominent policy framework was born. Following the adoption, the Danish government made Statistics Denmark (SD) the responsible authority for national SDG reporting. The strategy to fulfill this task has been to work closely with stakeholders in the business community, public authorities and NGO’s. SD has further worked to implement the SDG-framework on the business sector, in particular inspired by work done in UNCTAD about indicators for business entity reporting on economic, environmental, social and institutional issues. The work in SD has shown that it is possible to provide SDG-relevant information by type of industry using existing statistical data. Emission of CO2 and energy efficiency are examples from the environmental economic accounts. Social and business statistics can provide data on employment and wages broken down by gender, and also follow the development in occupational injuries, just to mention a few examples. However, existing data cannot provide information on how enterprises work with the SDGs. To cover this aspect, a survey among the largest private Danish enterprises was conducted in 2019. A third type of data source may be created by adding additional questions to existing surveys. The article is concluded by a discussion on the lessons learned so far and possible next steps are outlined.