Efforts by Japanese Businesses to Achieve the SDGs

JFS Newsletter No.175 (March 2017)

Image by Camera guy.

As a successor to the millennium development goals (MDGs) for 2015, the sustainable development goals (SDGs) were adopted by the UN General Assembly in September 2015. While the former mainly focused on improvements among developing countries, the latter target issues such as climate change, energy, health and employment in all countries, both developing and developed. The targets are shared by governments, businesses, civil society and people from all walks of life on Earth.

Sustainable Development Goals and Businesses

The SDGs are a set of 17 sustainable development goals and 169 targets supporting these goals. To promote achievement of the goals, the SDGs Index and Dashboard was launched to assess progress of 149 countries toward the SDGs, based on data from the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Health Organization (WHO) and other organizations. It encourages each country to work toward these goals by comparing the efforts and performance of each country.

Meanwhile, a new, socially aware form of investment called "environment, society and governance (ESG) investment" has been gaining popularity worldwide. This takes non-financial information into consideration based on environmental, societal and corporate governance conditions. Today, about 30 percent of asset management balance in the world is said to be ESG investment. It is especially popular in Europe, where it accounts for about 60 percent of investment. In Japan, the percentage is still small, but the Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF), the world's biggest fund, managing the employee and national pension reserves with about 130 trillion yen (about US$1.12 trillion), ratified the United Nation-supported Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) and embarked on ESG investment. The percentage of ESG investment in Japan is expected to increase.

Efforts and performance toward achieving the SDGs are being used as criteria for evaluating ESG investment. In that way, and because companies make efforts in business development and corporate social responsibility (CSR), considering issues all human beings face, companies' sincere efforts toward trying to achieve the SDGs will be more and more important.

We often hear businesses complain, however, that they do not know how to use the SDGs, even though they understand how important they are.

It is in this context that Seiya Yokoyama, a student of Japan for Sustainability's chief executive, Junko Edahiro, who teaches at the Faculty of Environmental Studies at Tokyo City University, investigated the SDGs and published his graduation thesis titled "Response to the SDGs - Comparison between Japanese and Overseas Businesses." This newsletter article introduces good examples of efforts by Japanese companies to achieve the SDGs, revealed by the results of his study.

Read more...