Page 31 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

26 2. Sustainability, sustainable development, and business sustainability

globally was included in the nonbinding document resulting from the conference called “The
Future We Want” (United Nations, 2012). The Agenda 2030, based on 17 Sustainable Devel-
opment Goals (SDGs), was actually adopted in 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly.
Reasonably, these new goals were thought to substitute the previous Millennium Develop-
ment Goals (MDGs) to be met by 2015. The former set of goals was not successful everywhere
for different reasons. Firstly, the focus was given to development issues, treating the environ-
mental dimension as a separate goal without any strong interconnection with the social one.
Secondly, MDGs mainly targeted the so-called developing countries without taking into any
account the strong interdependence between them and the wealthier countries for what con-
cerns the socioeconomic and environmental dimensions. Lastly, MDGs were operationalized
at the institutional and technical level, without any engagement of other involved stake-
holders such as citizens and local communities or companies. On the contrary, SDGs were
developed trying a different approach based on the weak points, which influenced the failure
of the previous agenda. SDGs are global goals; every country in the world should work to
meet them. Moreover, the silo thinking is overcome by a 17 interlinked goal structure, with
goals that combine environmental, social, and economic aspects at the same time. Lastly, a
multistakeholder approach is considered the best one to tackle complexity. For this reason,
every level and stakeholder is called to contribute to the global goals: from states to local ad-
ministrations, from NGOs to citizens, from companies to social businesses, from research in-
stitutes and universities to schools.

2.3 Business sustainability

Business sustainability has a paramount role in the context of global unsustainability. Busi-
ness responsibility on this issue is largely supported by nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs), such as Oxfam International. For instance, the organization affirms that the business
practice of tax dodging constitutes an unjust advantage for big companies over small and
medium enterprises, and deprives countries of an important income to tackle poverty and
inequalities. Moreover, businesses are often responsible for poverty wages (Oxfam
International, 2014).
The recent encyclical letter on the environment by Pope Francis also states that negative
environmental impacts such as pollution, water shortage, natural resource depletion, and
deforestation account businesses as one of the main responsible parties. It also invites com-
panies to follow their vocation of serving the common good through positive value creation
(Pope Francis, 2015).
In 2015, the IPCC affirmed that business-as-usual should be urgently left forever for global
temperature increase to stop below 2°C relative to preindustrial levels, in order to prevent
irreversible climate changes and unknown scenarios. The special IPCC report published in
2018, while stating that 1°C temperature growth above preindustrial level has already been
reached, drew the pathway for it to be halted at a 1.5°C increase by 2030. SDG 12 “Sustainable
Production and Consumption” is considered coherent with the identified pathway.
The need for a change in the business model was also supported by former United Nations
Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon (2014) in his report on the post-2015 agenda, and indirectly
implied by the new 2030 Agenda through goals and targets such as #12 Sustainable Produc-
tion and Consumption, target 12.C: