On September 25th 2015, countries adopted a set of goals to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure prosperity for all as part of a new sustainable development agenda. Each goal has specific targets to be achieved over the next 15 years. For the goals to be reached, everyone needs to do their part: governments, the private sector, civil society and individuals. The theme of ‘India and Sustainability Standards: International Dialogues & Conference (ISS 2016)’ 16th -18th November, 2016 at India Habitat Centre (IHC), New Delhi, revolves around the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – especially around enterprises and their potential to contribute to these ambitious goals. Treeni Sustainability Solutions is a support partner for the ISS 2016 conference. We are a software product company and core to us is ‘resustain’ our sustainability data management and analytics platform is built by sustainability practitioners and architected on open technologies.

Technology enabling the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals will potentially be one of the most powerful drivers of change in modern economies going forward. The explosion of digital technologies and the shift towards sustainable development, both require us to rethink the nature of goods and services; both have the capacity to transform the relationship between governments, companies, consumers and the community. Sustainability technology will have to scale and accommodate a different data sources and formats, as well as functionality, ideally by a platform offering to monitor, track and measure key performance indicators (KPIs). From a strategic perspective, material issues and their associated key performance indicators need to be aligned to SDGs. Performance management in context of goals thereby become tied to measurable and quantifiable indicators.

While organizations across the globe are identifying material aspects/ topics and aligning to one or more SDG goals, it is important for organizations to prepare to monitor and measure KPIs across the value chain.

Foresight is the key to survival. Leadership and managers should be provided with technology and systems that help them perceive trends and weak signals, where others might only see noise or chaos. At Treeni we are capitalizing on this need and through our relentless pursuit for ‘reimagining sustainability’, we are finding innovative ways to help clients evolve in practicing sustainability the right way. We would like to highlight certain benefits of incorporating SDGs in a technology platform which we believe will bring in a paradigm shift in how businesses view Sustainability. Such technology solutions must have:

• The ability to manage the entire inventory of 17 Goals and 169 indicators along with corresponding Business Themes as defined in the SDG Compass (https://sdgcompass.org/), which will direct a wide variety of stakeholders to track the performance of their initiatives & projects
• Enable tracking and data modelling capabilities, but will help visualize the data around SDGs achieved based on the projects implemented
• Map each SDG goal with the widely accepted frameworks & standards like GRI, SASB, CDP, DJSI, thus providing the organizations to interlink various frameworks against which they have been tracking progress
• Further the platform should make report generation and communication of progress to all stakeholders easy, inbuilt functionality should generate insights and periodic reports that help organizations, investors, governments and wide variety of participants to assess risk & opportunities and act promptly

The conference will take place from 16th-18th November at the India Habitat Centre (IHC), New Delhi. Our team will be at the Conference. Register for a place (https://www.sustainabilitystandards.in/register)