Monetizing impacts of Spanish companies toward the Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract

Corporate sustainability reporting has gained increasing prominence over the last years to quantitative and qualitatively reflect progress of enterprises toward sustainability. However, the measurement of the economic contribution of firms in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is still a pending issue. This research aims at bridging this gap by devising a new system that monetizes impacts of Spanish companies in the fulfillment of the SDGs. A panel of three experts in sustainability determined a set of 33 suitable indicators that represent the SDGs. Best-Worst method was then used to perform a multi-criteria decision analysis to determine weighting factors through responses from a two-part questionnaire circulated to 50 national respondents. The application of the new tool to a Spanish firm underlined a weak linkage between some SDGs and business activities, and the complexity of disaggregating accounting data to feed the metrics of the new framework. The development of instruments that associate the challenges of the 2030 Agenda with corporate accounting was recommended.

Businesses’ Role in the Fulfillment of the 2030 Agenda: A Bibliometric Analysis

“…This means that this is not an issue that only affects public institutions or governments-companies are a key element in achieving the SDGs [14,18,[25][26][27][28]. The SDGs are of such magnitude that it is not enough for one actor to commit to them; commitments of businesses, governments, non-governmental organizations, and stakeholders are needed [1,2,28,29].…”

“…Organizations must design their business plans from a more sustainable perspective considering two premises: harm the SDGs as little as possible and implement actions to help achieve those goals (e.g., save energy, reduce emissions, circular economy, etc.) [6,15,26,[29][30][31]. This is the new challenge for businesses to not just maximize their benefits; now, they must do so in a sustainable way and collaborate with the environment that surrounds us [28,32].…”

“…Khaled et al demonstrated the importance of this topic, affirming that "it is crucial to explore potential frameworks that would guide companies on how they can align their strategies as well as measure and communicate their contribution to the SDGs" [14] (p. 1). There are many questions about the relationship between the SDGs and business performance (e.g., if they prioritize SDGs or focus on a global perspective, if they elaborate on SDGs reports, if these activities have economic advantages for companies, and how the SDGs are perceived by their stakeholders) [26,29,34,36].…”

Toward a Sustainable University: Babes-Bolyai University Goes Green

“…Weber (2017) criticized the SDGs, as the author considers the goals a result of a political project developed by entities that will most benefit from it, and given the indivisible character of the goals, the agenda may not be realized. Scholars have started to investigate how organizations are contributing to the achievement of the goals through several studies focused on different countries: Italy (Di Vaio and Varriale 2020;Izzo et al 2020), Spain (Ferro et al 2019;Peña-Sánchez et al 2020;Diaz-Sarachaga 2021), Greece (Tsalis et al 2020), Russia (Blagov and Petrova-Savchenko 2021), Japan (Ike et al 2021), Portugal (Santos and Silva Bastos 2020), India (Poddar et al 2019), and the Czech Republic and Poland (Šebestová and Sroka 2020). In the case of HEIs, scholars have been investigating different disclosure practices or have focused mainly on intellectual capital disclosure (Fazlagic 2005;Ndou et al 2018;Brusca et al 2020;Nicolò et al 2020;Aversano et al 2020;Nicolò et al 2021b).…”

Making Information Measurement Meaningful: The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and the Social and Human Capital Protocol

“…Moreover, this internal information may be reported externally to demonstrate to the wider public how the organization is giving consideration to social and human capital areas. The Social and Human Capital Protocol has received very little analysis in academic journals, with only cursory comment, e.g., Diaz-Sarachaga [73] described the SHCP as a "unidimensional approach" for integrated sustainability reporting. Moreover, Nicholls [74] listed the SHCP among current approaches to social and environmental accounting and used the SHCP definition of valuation.…”