Scan

Scan: A Comprehensive List of Sustainability Issues for Companies

More companies are becoming interested in understanding how environmental and social factors may impact their business and what impacts their business may have on these issues. This guide provides a comprehensive list of emerging environmental, social, and governance issues, to help you reflect on your company’s impacts and identify where to prioritise action and allocate resources.

Embedded Strategies for the Sustainability Transition

It is time for companies to take a very different approach to corporate strategy.

Our Embedded Strategies guide helps companies respond to the growing calls for businesses to articulate their purpose and their strategy in alignment with the need to shift the global economy towards the reduction of inequality, a rapid climate transition, the preservation of biodiversity, and the elimination of waste.

This guide will help you to develop a contextual strategy and goals that ensure your company is doing its part to maintain the resilience of key social and environmental systems.

Building on our Road to Context guide with insights from 300+ interviews with senior executives, CEOs, board chairs, and directors, as well as our experiences supporting companies around the world, it outlines resources and tactics that can help your company to scan for emerging issues and risks; understand their implications for your business; understand your impacts and your potential for positive influence; prioritise where it makes sense to direct your efforts; and set your strategy and goals in alignment with delivering systems value.

ENCORE (Exploring Natural Capital Opportunities, Risks, and Exposure)

ENCORE (Exploring Natural Capital Opportunities, Risks, and Exposure), a free tool from the Natural Capital Finance Alliance, can help you to visualise how your business may be exposed to accelerating environmental change. The tool provides a snapshot of the dependencies and impacts for a wide range of sub-industries and processes, and includes fact sheets and maps to help you understand the links between business activities and nature.

CEO Guides

The WBCSD has published a number of CEO Guides to provide a high-level overview on the risks and opportunities of corporate sustainability issues. These guides focus on topics such as human rights, water, climate-related financial disclosures, the SDGs, climate action, and the circular economy, and will support executives at your company with understanding key themes and trends, aligning business strategy with critical societal and environmental agendas, and developing and implementing meaningful, credible goals.

SDG Compass

The SDG Compass aims to provide guidance to companies to help align their strategies and measure their contributions to the Sustainable Development Goals. Of particular value is step 3 (setting goals), which focuses on setting specific, measurable, and time-bound corporate sustainability goals across the organisation.

Systems Change Lab

This open-source data platform monitors global progress across major social and environmental systems and identifies transformational shifts needed to protect both people and the planet. The platform uses an interactive visual to highlight progress against climate, biodiversity, and equity targets (among others) and identifies the key forces that are driving positive and negative impacts on each topic. The platform identifies indicators that can show where change momentum is growing and waning, and features a dashboard that shows how systems connect and highlights where coordinated action is most needed. This tool is a good entry point for junior change agents, executives, and other professionals who want to build their understanding of interrelated natural and social systems and the trajectory of actions affecting them.

Good practices for credible benchmarking

ISEAL has created several guides that can help you to ensure the quality, consistency, transparency, robustness, and alignment of benchmarking processes. The Sustainability Benchmarking Good Practice Guide introduces a framework and practical set of good practices for organisations that want to carry out a benchmarking exercise or develop a benchmarking program. Rather than propose specific criteria or requirements to be used in a benchmark, the guide sets out considerations that can help you to create a benchmark development process that meets your company's specific needs. ISEAL has also created a complementary checklist to support these efforts.

The Global Sustainability Competitiveness Index

This index from Solability provides a comprehensive ranking of national sustainability. Using data from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and various other UN agencies, the index groups 216 quantitative indicators into six sub-indexes: Natural Capital, Resource Efficiency & Intensity, Intellectual Capital, Economic Sustainability, Governance Efficiency, and Social Cohesion. This is a good resource for helping you to understand how sustainable a country is, both as an individual and against peers, and for helping you to make informed decisions around siting operations and procurement.

The Future of Sustainability 2024/2025: Reimagining the Way the World Works

This annual report from the Forum for the Future can help you to better understand how business can build resilience to the climate crisis. The 2024/2025 report sets the scene about the future of sustainability, shines a light on bright spots, highlights the possibilities that may emerge if we scale and multiply positive opportunities, and issues a call to focus on transformative action.. This report will be useful to business leaders and change-makers seeking to build business resilience in the face of intersecting crises.

SDG Stocktake: Through the Eyes of the Private Sector

This illustrative report from the UN Global Compact can help you understand the private sector’s net impact on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It weighs the private sector’s overall positive economic impacts against negative social and environmental impacts, providing an impact overview for each of the 17 goals. It also outlines a private sector blueprint for action by 2030, which includes ten cross-sector actions that businesses can follow to advance the SDGs. The report will be most useful to sustainability teams, especially in organisations that have emphasised SDG alignment in their sustainability reporting and strategy.

Carrots & Sticks: ESG & Sustainability Policy worldwide

This policy database from GRI and partner universities can help you understand the sustainability policy landscape of countries around the world. It covers the voluntary and mandatory policies of 130 countries, and provides a brief analysis for each policy, including restrictiveness, focus areas, and alignment with the SDGs and GRI. Carrots & Sticks also provides an annual report, which examines ESG & sustainability policies and highlights those issuing them. This tool will be most useful to sustainability and legal departments.

Competing in the Age of Disruption

This new report from the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) outlines a pathway for the private sector to proactively respond to our current volatile geopolitical context while continuing sustainability efforts. It identifies six key priorities for navigating today's political and economic instability and accelerating market-wide transition to a more just and sustainable economy, such as shifting from compliance and incrementalism to value, competition, and transformation; escaping the "ESG trap" of tokenistic and reactive actions and prioritising market-wide impact; innovating to create and protect value; and more. This resource will be especially beneficial for sustainability professionals seeking to elevate and explain the issue of the burgeoning global economic transition to senior leaders.

Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries

The latest update to the Planetary Boundaries framework finds that six of the nine boundaries are transgressed, with suggesting that Earth is now well outside of the safe operating space for humanity. This is the third major assessment of the planetary boundaries framework, and is the first to provide a complete check-up of all nine processes and systems that maintain the stability and resilience of our planet. This is a key resource for helping sustainability change agents and senior leaders understand the status of environmental limits and ecosystem services foundations that humanity depends upon for survival.

Future-Fit Business Benchmark

The Future-Fit Business Benchmark is a free open-source tool grounded in systems science, and is designed to help companies assess where they are relative to necessary levels of environmental and social performance. The Benchmark includes an Action Guide and Methodology Guide that outline categories of positive environmental and social impacts and help companies articulate and quantify their unique contributions in a consistent framing (Positive Pursuits). It also describes areas of environmental and social footprint that represent risk areas to businesses and external stakeholders until they are addressed (Break-Even Goals). The Benchmark guidance also aligns with the UN SDGs. By using Future-Fit's guidance and metrics, companies can clearly understand and credibly communicate their contribution to the SDGs.