Interesting report last week on Edie that the UK Government has no plans in place to  meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and that private sector uptake has been slow. The implicit assumption in the article is that the SDGs are a good thing, but I always believe you should question everything.

The case for the SDGs are that they are comprehensive, third party and UN endorsed. Demonstrating how you are doing against the SDGs makes a pretty good table in an annual report or a slide in a corporate presentation.

The case against is that there are a whopping 17 SDGs, 169 targets, and many of those targets are extremely vague – e.g. “7.2 Increase substantially the level of renewable energy”. How do you know when you have contributed to that target?

If you want to inspire people inside your organisation then you need 3 – 7 stretch targets – something jaw dropping like ‘zero carbon’ or ‘zero waste’ that really make people sit up and think.

Seven is pretty much the limit of how many items in a list we can easily recall – I’d be very surprised if anyone could recite all 17 SDGs without stumbling. By all means compare your targets against the SDGs, but using the SDGs to drive Sustainability in one organisation is the tail wagging the dog.