The United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) has released a manual which provides—for the first time—a comprehensive set of indicators for assessing organisational performance in the context of sustainability thresholds and transformative change needed to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030.
- The manual, titled Authentic Sustainability Assessment: A User Manual for the Sustainable Development Performance Indicators, was released on 1 November.
More About the Manual: The 106-page manual proposes a new, more authentic approach for measuring and reporting on the sustainability performance of economic entities in relation to the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
- The approach is grounded in a two-tiered framework with a set of 61 sustainable development performance indicators (SDPIs) that assess sustainability impacts and performance against context-based normative thresholds and transformative change potential—thereby transcending the limitations of existing indicators and frameworks.
- Each SDPI includes a definition, trend analysis dimension, relevance to the SDGs and, where relevant, a sustainability threshold or norm.
- UNRISD’s SDPI approach empowers both for-profit enterprises (FPEs) and social and solidarity economy (SSE) entities to meaningfully assess the extent to which their economic behaviours are well-governed and contributing to maintaining environmental and socioeconomic resources at levels required for sustainable development.
- The Manual was developed based on the findings of a pilot test of all 61 indicators that showed that implementing the SDPI approach is both feasible and desired by economic entities, standard setters and framework providers.
- It is the main output of the UNRISD SDPI project.
The Sustainability Indicators: The Sustainable Development Performance Indicators (SDPI) produced by UNRISD measure the sustainability performance of economic entities, including both for-profit enterprises and social and solidarity economy organisations.
- They assess impacts or performance against norms and thresholds that indicate a target consistent with the notion of sustainable development, as well as shed light on ignored or neglected issue areas within current measurement and reporting models.
- The indicators help users to gain information on genuine impacts or performance of their enterprises and organisations in socioeconomic, governance and environmental areas.
- In September 2018, UNRISD commenced a four-year project which aimed to assess and improve methodologies and indicator systems that measure and evaluate the performance of a broad range of economic entities in relation to the vision and goals of the 2030 Agenda.
- This SDPI Online Platform provides an easy-to-use tool to assess the progress of companies or organisations towards sustainability.
- It produces an automatically generated report that features trend analysis and allows users to assess impacts or performance in relation to sustainability norms and thresholds.
- The platform provides a crucial means to gauge the extent of transformative change towards genuine sustainability.
