Sustainable Development Goals

If you have the Sustainable Development Goals, why use climate solutions and human development pillars?

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the globally agreed set of goals for all countries to meet the UN 2030 agenda for sustainable development and link to other global sustainability objectives like the Paris Agreement. They provide a desired end point for the 17 goals through 169 targets and were created for policy makers rather than investors. However, end points are not themselves solutions and mapping investments to the SDGs gives significant room to make assumptions on how companies are contributing to the goals which may or may not be sound.

We believe mapping formal investment objectives to the SDGs can lead to several issues including:

• Lack of balance between positive SDG impacts and risks and issues each company faces
• Lack of portfolio transparency
• Simplistic and overly-broad approaches to tagging company contributions
• A lack of information on the approach and process

Our SDG mapping is an outcome of our bottom-up investment process and we map each of our investee companies to a maximum of two SDGs which we believe are most related to each company. When considering our mapping we aim to look beyond the 17 goals to the more specific targets.

Generally speaking, Project Drawdown’s climate solutions and our human development pillars fit neatly with the objectives of the SDGs while also focusing on the practical solutions which companies can demonstrate a contribution to. We see these different views as complementary.