Global Goals Yearbook 2018
The future of the United Nations is more uncertain than at any time before. Like his predecessors, UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, has promised to reform the United Nations. Drivers are two major agreements: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Climate Accord. Both stand for a move away from statal top-down multilateralism towards new form of partnership between the public and the private sector as well as the civil society. The Global Goals Yearbook, published under the auspices of the macondo foundation, therefore covers „Partnership for the Goals“ as its 2018 main topic. Our world is truly not sustainable at this time. To make the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development a success story, we need an enormous increase in effort. This cannot happen without help from the private sector. But businesses need a reason to contribute as well as attractive partnerships that are based on win-win constellations. We have no alternative but to rethink the role that public–private partnerships can play in this effort. That is why United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres is calling upon UN entities to strengthen and better align their private-sector engagement. In every change there is a new chance. The Global Goals Yearbook 2018 discusses the multiple aspects of how private sector engagement can be improved. Recommendations are, among others, to revise multilaterism, partnership models and processes and to invest more in trust, a failure culture as well as metrics and monitoring. When businesses engage in partnerships for the Goals, this is more than just signing checks. It means inserting the “do good” imperative of the SDGs into corporate culture, business cases, innovation cycles, investor relationships, and, of course, the daily management processes and (extra-)financial reporting. The Yearbook includes arguments from academic and business experts, the World Bank and the Club of Rome as well as UN entities, among them UNDP, UNSSC, UNOPS, UN JIU, and UN DESA.
The future of the United Nations is more uncertain than at any time before. Like his predecessors, UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, has promised to reform the United Nations. Drivers are two major agreements: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Paris Climate Accord. Both stand for a move away from statal top-down multilateralism towards new form of partnership between the public and the private sector as well as the civil society. The Global Goals Yearbook, published under the auspices of the macondo foundation, therefore covers „Partnership for the Goals“ as its 2018 main topic.
Our world is truly not sustainable at this time. To make the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development a success story, we need an enormous increase in effort. This cannot happen without help from the private sector. But businesses need a reason to contribute as well as attractive partnerships that are based on win-win constellations.
We have no alternative but to rethink the role that public–private partnerships can play in this effort. That is why United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres is calling upon UN entities to strengthen and better align their private-sector engagement. In every change there is a new chance.
The Global Goals Yearbook 2018 discusses the multiple aspects of how private sector engagement can be improved. Recommendations are, among others, to revise multilaterism, partnership models and processes and to invest more in trust, a failure culture as well as metrics and monitoring.
When businesses engage in partnerships for the Goals, this is more than just signing checks. It means inserting the “do good” imperative of the SDGs into corporate culture, business cases, innovation cycles, investor relationships, and, of course, the daily management processes and (extra-)financial reporting.
The Yearbook includes arguments from academic and business experts, the World Bank and the Club of Rome as well as UN entities, among them UNDP, UNSSC, UNOPS, UN JIU, and UN DESA.
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CIRCULAR ECONOMY:<br />
THE CONTRIBUTION OF<br />
THE CHEMICAL INDUSTRY<br />
At BASF, we combine economic success, social responsibility and environmental protection<br />
– and we state this in our corporate purpose: “We create chemistry for a sustainable future”.<br />
The concept of the circular economy, which is gaining in importance, may hold the key<br />
to a more sustainable future by more firmly decoupling value generation from virgin fossil<br />
resource use and waste generation.<br />
By Dr. Brigitte Dittrich-Krämer, Dr. Christine Bunte, Dr. Andreas Kicherer, and Talke Schaffrannek, BASF<br />
BASF is committed to the economically<br />
efficient and ecologically effective use<br />
of resources – through our production<br />
and our products. These aspects come<br />
together in the “circular economy” concept,<br />
in which growth is decoupled from<br />
resource consumption. The efficient use<br />
of raw materials has been implemented<br />
in our production processes for decades,<br />
yet the transition from a linear to a more<br />
circular economy can bring significant<br />
changes to the way we do business. It can<br />
provide additional value across industries<br />
and to society at large. BASF is already<br />
applying the circular economy concept<br />
in a number of ways by pursuing two<br />
complementary approaches: “Keep it<br />
smart” and “Close the loops.”<br />
Examples of our contribution to a<br />
circular economy<br />
• “Keep it smart”<br />
“Keep it smart” implies continued efforts<br />
to increase efficiency within BASF’s own<br />
production processes, in our customers’<br />
production processes, and for the end-user<br />
as well. The smart use of BASF solutions<br />
has reduced waste along the value chain<br />
and introduced more efficient resource<br />
use for our customers. One example is our<br />
resource- and energy-efficient Verbund<br />
production system, which we operate at<br />
six sites around the globe. It creates efficient<br />
value chains from basic chemicals<br />
right through to high-value-added products<br />
such as coatings and crop protection<br />
products. While doubling our sales volumes<br />
since 1990, we have also been able<br />
to cut our greenhouse gas emissions by<br />
half in absolute terms, and by 75 percent<br />
when measured per metric ton of product.<br />
To support a stronger decoupling of production<br />
from the use of fossil resources,<br />
BASF has developed the “biomass balance”<br />
94<br />
<strong>Global</strong> <strong>Goals</strong> <strong>Yearbook</strong> <strong>2018</strong>
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