Assessing how economic activities impact the multiple dimensions of sustainability is a central challenge of the twenty-first century. In this paper, the authors present evidence-based indications of sector-level impacts on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which can guide equity investors in identifying general impacts typically expected by companies who belong in the same sector.
Aligning investments with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has been a longstanding ambition for many private investors. The assessment of corporate impact on the SDGs is not a trivial task, and most present-day attempts often overlook SDG interactions, and lack scientific anchoring and transparency. The authors present an evidence-based review approach for investors to assess sector-level impacts on individual SDGs, and score these using a traffic-light system. Their initial review documents impacts of 81 economic sectors on SDGs 1-16. Results show that environmental SDGs are impacted negatively by most economic sectors, and that primary sector activities negatively impact the highest number of SDGs. Using the agricultural sector as a case, the authors draw on Causal Loop methodology to illustrate spillovers resulting from SDG interactions. Their findings point to three key considerations of relevance for sustainable investment strategies; the necessity to capture ‘impact shadows’, spillovers across SDGs, and the hierarchical nature of the SDGs.
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