In 2015, the UN laid out its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which included 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In the years since, organizations worldwide have used this as a framework for connecting business goals to sustainability.
As the world increasingly recognizes the impact businesses have on the environment, people, and society, corporate sustainability goals have received a lot of attention. Investors, regulators, consumers, and employees have pushed companies to create plans that consider our shared future. But depending on your industry, market, and scale, becoming “sustainable” may require significant changes and long-term planning.
One of the main difficulties with setting corporate sustainability goals is the lack of visibility in your organization’s current energy and sustainability data. To make matters more complicated, regulating bodies are also cracking down on businesses that overstate their commitment to sustainability, and avoiding “greenwashing” claims can be tricky.
Businesses that want to pursue sustainability need to set realistic targets and adopt the processes, policies, and technologies necessary to reach them. In this article, we’ll discuss what it takes to create meaningful corporate sustainability goals and ensure you can actually achieve them.
Want to see an example of corporate sustainability goals? Take a look at Tango’s first Sustainability Report, where we lay out the steps we’re taking to reach net-zero emissions by 2030, reach a 50/50 male-to-female workforce ratio, and more.
Setting corporate sustainability goals
Since corporate sustainability encompasses environmental, social, and governance outcomes, you’ll have to analyze your current state in each area to establish realistic goals. And while you may emphasize one or two of these areas, it’s important to recognize how they each contribute to your organization’s sustainability. This means reviewing a combination of financial and non-financial data, and then setting appropriate goals accordingly.
To determine which areas your goals should focus on, you’ll want to conduct a materiality assessment, which prioritizes ESG issues according to your approach to sustainability risk management. As key stakeholders consider the financial risks of each area and the potential significance to the environment, people, and society, you can plot your priorities on a matrix, like we did in our 2023 Sustainability Report:
Environmental sustainability goals
Environmental sustainability goals address two main concerns relating to your organization’s relationship to climate change:
- Improving resilience to major weather events and a changing climate
- Decreasing your impact on the environment
Improving operational resilience
Weather-resistant infrastructure helps mitigate many of the business risks associated with climate change by decreasing the disruption events like storms, earthquakes, flooding, and heat waves cause to your organization. This type of corporate sustainability goal involves processes like:
- Hardening infrastructure with more weather-resistant design, materials, and technology
- Establishing redundant power supplies and operational infrastructure
- Diversifying your supply chain to ensure that your operations can continue if a major supplier is affected by a major weather event
Your goals will need to be specific to your locations and the types of weather events they’re most likely to experience, as well as your budget and ability to invest in infrastructure. You might, for example, set a goal to install central air conditioning at all your locations within five years. Or to retrofit your buildings with flood-resistant materials. Maybe you want to invest in on-site renewables to establish your own off-grid power supply in 10 years.
The outcomes and timelines for these types of goals should be rooted in the weather-related challenges you’re most likely to face, and the resources you have at your disposal. Perhaps you can only afford to fund 10% of your goal per year. Or the time it takes to design the changes, coordinate contractors, and execute the objective will require five or more years based on local availability. No matter how far out your time horizon, it’s important to consider the factors that will govern your progress and set realistic parameters.
Reducing emissions and consumption
The gold standard for environmental sustainability goals is establishing a timeline for reaching net-zero emissions: the point at which all your organization’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are offset or removed.
Emissions and energy-consumption-related goals require accurate data and a clear understanding of how various processes contribute toward emissions. You can’t simply make a goal to be carbon-neutral by 2030, replace some light bulbs, and hope you get there. You need to know how much energy your facilities, vehicles, equipment, and operations consume, so you can determine how much you need to reduce or offset them. Then you can consider the steps it would take to get there and evaluate what a reasonable timeline would be.
For example, using Tango Energy & Sustainability by WatchWire to get a baseline of our energy consumption, we established a GHG inventory for our offices’ Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions:
For many businesses, establishing this baseline is the greatest challenge with setting corporate sustainability goals—which is why you should tackle this first when getting started.
The more distributed your organization, the more difficult it becomes to organize and analyze your energy consumption data. Locations in different regions have different utility providers, which means your energy bills come in distinct formats with varying levels of detail. Manually standardizing and auditing this disparate data is a time-consuming, error-prone process, but Tango Energy & Sustainability automatically imports your utility bills, standardizes their format, and audits them for common errors, giving you accurate data you can review and analyze in one place. Tango also helps you perform carbon accounting calculations and track your Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions.
Once you have your GHG emissions data, you can set goals for decreasing them based on your materiality assessment, capabilities, and opportunities. For example, if inefficient equipment or vehicles represent a significant percentage of your emissions, an initiative to replace them with more efficient models could make a carbon neutrality or net-zero goal far more attainable or accelerate the timeline you’d need to reach other goals. Or perhaps your goals will require you to rethink your operations altogether—like developing a recycling program that allows you to reuse leftover production materials or turn byproducts into something useful.
Social sustainability goals
Social sustainability goals center around your impact on people, including local communities, employees, customers, clients, suppliers, and partners. This might look like promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion within your workplace and your industry, investing in scholarship programs or charities, sponsoring community events, or promoting local volunteerism within your workforce.
Your goals might involve donating a specific amount to relevant charities over the next several years. Or having a certain number of volunteer hours. Maybe you want to launch an industry event with a few hundred attendees in its first few years. Or you need to change the makeup of your workforce to more accurately reflect the population.
Our social sustainability goals involved a wide range of commitments to industry education and community building, as well as donating time and resources. But we also looked at the composition of our workforce and made a commitment to reach a 50/50 male-to-female ratio of employees, and to increase the number of women in senior leadership positions.
Governance sustainability goals
Sustainable governance has an organizational structure, policies, culture, and values that promote and foster environmental, social, and economic sustainability. Demonstrating sustainable governance requires corporations to do things like:
- Comply with all applicable regulations
- Formally define processes for holding employees and leadership accountable for unethical behavior
- Implement employee training programs that advance sustainable education
- Follow modern data security practices
- Reflect diversity in its board of directors
Some governance-related goals are easy on paper. You can establish policies and define better practices relatively quickly. However, rooting out unethical behavior, changing company culture, and adopting new ways of working takes time, and some of these are ongoing goals you need to continually prove your commitment to, rather than objectives you achieve and move beyond.
Depending on your industry, your sustainable governance goals may involve passing certifications, meeting standards, or undergoing audits that demonstrate your commitment to rigorous ethical practices. For Tango, it’s meant securing FedRAMP authorizations for five of our key software products, as well as achieving our SOC2 Type II certification, both of which speak to our rigorous data security controls. We also require employees to complete a series of ethics-based courses on sexual harassment, data security, IT, and our company policies regarding conduct, discrimination, and more.
Check out our sustainability report
Before you start setting your own corporate sustainability goals, it may help to take a closer look at ours. While Tango Energy & Sustainability by WatchWire helps organizations with their environmental sustainability goals, we’ve evaluated our progress toward all our energy & sustainability goals, and the 41 page Tango Sustainability Report explains the process in detail.
And when you’re done, let’s talk about how Tango Energy & Sustainability can help you set, track, and reach your environmental sustainability goals—just request a demo.