How can digital technologies be used to achieve SDG goals?
Imagine a platform with the ability to provide you insights, not just reports and help you really make sustainability decisions? This is the use case of GenAI, where one can get answers to complex questions in a simple conversational style like “how am I doing on my carbon emissions?”
SDGs or Sustainable Development Goals is the framework designed by the United Nations in 2015 to achieve sustainability or address Environment, Social and Governance issues. Now here is the catch. SDGs were really meant for countries – not companies, not products and were meant for achieving overall prosperity, not just climate change, and that too by 2030.
So what will happen after 2030? Well, I assume that we will revisit targets and tweak them based on urgency. In any case, countries are far behind in achieving the goals mentioned in 2030, so it’s all pretty relative.
To understand the SDGs in brief, I like breaking them into the broader framework of ESG –
1. Environment – Goals related to reduction of carbon emissions – from raw materials, biodiversity, marine life to electricity, water, waste management, packaging and logistics – all these points are covered under SDG 2, 6, 7, 9, 13,14, 15.
2. Social – Goals related to creation of social impact – jobs creation, reducing poverty, wellness, education, gender, inclusion etc – covered under SDG 1, 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 12.
3. Governance – Goals related to transparency and accountability – Peace, Justice, partnerships, transparency in reporting, board governance, ethics etc – covered under SDG 16, 17.
With this background, we can look at the various technologies that exist for solving these goals.
1. Carbon Emissions – To track carbon emissions, we need the following tools
a. Data Collection ERPs – All activities that result in emitting harmful greenhouse gases need to be tracked – like electricity usage, water usage, waste generated and managed, materials used and mobility used. For this, companies use the traditional ERP systems to collect data from various sources and house it under a unified platform.
b. Carbon Calculators – Once data is collected, carbon calculators estimate the carbon footprint of organisations directly or indirectly from the list of activities performed. There is a new term called ‘carbon accounting’ which is nothing but the same way of measuring the CO2 emitted by each activity.
c. Scope 3 Emissions tracking – Since companies have their own data, it is easy to measure the carbon emissions from a list of activities performed by them. But how do they perform the same analysis for suppliers? As suppliers have little or no data and are unwilling to share details of their company. This is one of the most important problems in the industry right now. Special data analytics and AI powered tools exist for tracking this and estimations are becoming more accurate with usage.
2. Social Impact – This is easier to track because the data lies in the company’s own ERP. Let us take a few examples.
a. Employee welfare – Information on employees hired from BoP segment, their demographic, welfare policies, gender ratio and inclusion is available in the HRM systems and all that needs to be done is to define the correct rules – like number of employees under ESIC (Employee State Insurance Corporation), or gender ratio at factory level etc.
b. Consumer Wellness – For this goal, one can check the ingredients on the label of the product and read reviews of the customers that are housed in the CRM database.
3. Governance – For listed companies this is easy as there is a mandated set of disclosures that need to be followed as per SEBI. However, the larger world remains in the dark because there is really no way to tell if a company is ethical, if the board is run well etc. Good indicators to look for could be the number of litigations, sources of funding and taxation related compliances as all this data is in the public domain.
As one can see, there are various technologies that target specific pieces of the sustainability puzzle and as yet there is no one comprehensive platform that can achieve all goals. Here comes the world of Large Language Models (LLMs) – where corporations can get targeted answers to any questions they have under the world of sustainability. Imagine a platform with the ability to provide you insights, not just reports and help you really make sustainability decisions? This is the use case of GenAI, where one can get answers to complex questions in a simple conversational style like “how am I doing on my carbon emissions?”
