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Businesses are facing increasing demands from their stakeholders to be more transparent about their practices and exposure to risks related to their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance. Pushing against the trend for more transparency are the costs of data collection, requirements for assurance, exposure to legal jeopardy, and legitimate perceptions of reputational risk. This report navigates this ‘transparency dilemma’, to build a better understanding of the risk/return profile of transparency and thereby help companies to balance competing interests.

The Decent Work Toolkit for Sustainable Procurement will enable companies, procurement professionals and suppliers to develop a common understanding on how to advance decent work through purchasing decisions and scaling up efforts to improve lives around the globe. With a focus on trust and transparency, the Decent Work Toolkit for Sustainable Procurement is publicly available to all and contains real-life examples of buyers and suppliers jointly addressing decent work concerns in global supply chains.

Building on the original Guide for General Counsel on Corporate Sustainability published in 2015, Version 2.0 provides further guidance to General Counsel to ensure they are better placed and better equipped to drive change and deliver value to their organizations through an increased focus on corporate sustainability. Topics include: Corporate Sustainability and Business Integrity Corporate Sustainability and Business Integrity Human Rights and Supply Chain Due Diligence Corporate Sustainability and Grievance Mechanisms Challenges to Corporate Sustainability - Managing a Crisis Please fill out the form below to download the full guide.

This guide explores the role of corporate finance and investments in scaling finance for the Sustainable Development Goals, including how FDI, financial intermediation and public-private partnerships can be a source of finance for less liquid SDG investments that cannot be invested directly by portfolio or institutional investors. This includes providing access to finance in countries with less developed financial markets or for SDG solutions that are too small or illiquid to attract portfolio investors.   This publication is available in English and Spanish

Represents more than a decade of research on sustainable business. Together with the UN Global Compact Progress Report, it forms the world’s most comprehensive research to date on business contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals. The 2019 study draws on insights from more than 1,000 CEOs from 21 industries and 99 countries, including over 100 in-depth interviews, and nearly 1,600 senior business leaders who responded to the UN Global Compact implementation survey.

Outlines how companies can embed human rights into their corporate strategies and advance people-centred solutions to growing global challenges. The report presents snapshots of good practice from companies participating in the UN Global Compact, highlights insight by Global Compact Local Networks around the world, and showcases initiatives that are advancing seven major themes: future of work, climate justice, effective remedy and grievance mechanisms, migrant rights, gender equality, due diligence and tackling working poverty.

This publication presents the main discussions and outcomes from the 2019 UN Private Sector Forum Meeting on Climate Change. The Private Sector Forum took place in New York on 23 September 2019 as the official Luncheon of the UN Climate Action Summit convened by the UN Secretary-General to raise ambition to tackle climate change. It brought together more than 350 global climate leaders for a multi-stakeholder, inter-generational dialogue designed to help the world urgently align on a collective course of action in tackling the climate crisis. Important highlights included the introduction of the “Business Ambition for 1.5˚C” campaign, incentivizing companies to set science-based targets to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 and in line with a 1.5˚C future.

Future of Internet Power, a group of BSR member companies, is aiming to power the internet with 100 percent renewable energy. As prime customers of energy-intensive colocation data center facilities (colos), we believe that increased ambition and efforts to maximize renewables at colos will result in a cleaner cloud. Given the growing interest among both colo customers and service providers to use low-carbon energy sources and meet sustainability goals, the Future of Internet Power has created the following Corporate Colocation and Cloud Buyers' Principles

The publication highlights the potential role of social dialogue in fostering stability, equity, productivity, sustainable enterprises and inclusive growth. It also showcases some successful examples.

This guide aims to help companies set effective site water targets that are informed by catchment context, which can create value and lessen risks for the company and support collective action. This guide is intended for site staff or technical water specialists responsible for water management, and relevant corporate staff. This guide lays out three key elements for setting effective site water targets: Water targets should respond to priority water challenges within the catchment; The ambition of water targets should be informed by the site’s contribution to water challenges and desired conditions; and Water targets should reduce water risk, capitalize on opportunities, and contribute to public sector priorities.

In this year’s Special Edition of the UN Global Compact-Accenture Strategy CEO Study, the world’s largest program of CEO research on sustainability, we focus our attention on transforming partnerships for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Following a decade of research into the views of business leaders worldwide, we examine the views of UN leaders. As the UN Secretary-General calls for enhanced cooperation between the United Nations and the private sector, we ask agency heads and partnership practitioners across the UN system: what will it take to scale up partnerships to bring about transformational impact on the SDGs?