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From setting to achieving sustainability goals
Originally published May 8, 2020 at the Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise.
Why do companies have an easier time setting sustainability goals than achieving them? Modern corporations create astonishing wealth and innovation, but they have so far struggled to transform themselves to operate within the sustainable boundaries of natural resource systems, such as the atmosphere, forests, fisheries and soil systems.
In 2014, the New York Declaration on Forests saw a coalition of 52 companies, 66 nongovernmental organizations, 42 national governments, 9 financial institutions and 43 other actors set goals of cutting global deforestation in half and restoring millions of acres of land by 2020. But the rate of global deforestation by 43% from 2014 to 2018, compared to 2001–2013, and the coalition met only 20% of its land restoration goal .
A 2016 Bain & Company of 300 corporate sustainability efforts found that only 2% achieved their goals.
Let’s focus on two barriers to corporate sustainability related to research I’m doing as an Erb Institute postdoctoral research fellow. First, we still haven’t settled on a definition of corporate sustainability, frustrating our ability to set achievable sustainability goals. Second, we still haven’t closed the longstanding knowledge gap between…