At Stockholm +50, there is a request from business and policy leaders to enhance collaboration between the public and private sector to explore the potential for a new global corporate accountability and transparency mechanism. This will enable comparable and transparent information about the contribution business is making on climate, nature, pollution and circularity action targets, while supporting the system transformation needed for a net zero, nature positive and more equitable future.
The new mechanism, which would be a groundbreaking public-private architectural innovation, has been proposed as part of the Stockholm Action Agenda: Transforming Global Value Chains, which has been curated by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) in partnership with the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), and in close collaboration with the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).
To showcase and fully account for the contribution of business action, and to stimulate more, the world needs an overarching, trusted, global accountability framework that can highlight and track business contributions to climate, nature, pollution and circularity action targets. This framework needs to be packaged and presented in a compelling way to display complex information simply, so that non-experts can easily understand and trust a data dashboard of composite business action and progress against global targets.
Building on its Business Manifesto for Climate Recovery, launched at COP26, WBCSD is currently exploring with its member companies and partner organizations the potential to enhance global corporate climate accountability to better assess and track corporate progress against net zero targets.
Throughout 2022, WBCSD, with its member companies and partners, will help to convene a multi-stakeholder dialogue series. This will build on existing efforts in the field, assess the current landscape on corporate climate accountability, and work with businesses, organizations in the sector, UN organizations and platforms (like UNEP, UNFCCC and the Climate Champions, the High-Level Expert Group on the Net-Zero Emissions Commitments of Non-State Entities), academia, and civil society.
The dialogues series will explore the current challenges of corporate climate accountability and co-create recommendations on how to overcome these, and extend the discussion to other issues, including nature, pollution and circularity. The first dialogue in the series will be taking place in mid-July 2022. Following the conclusion of the dialogue series, the recommendations could be further developed and designed in time for the UN Summit of the Future in 2023 and implemented at the Global Stocktake in 2023.
Alongside the global corporate accountability and transparency mechanism, the Stockholm Action Agenda has also proposed the development of a ‘Global Circularity Protocol’ to remove common roadblocks for business and SMEs to scale circular business models, disincentivize linear ways of working across key value chains and stimulate a worldwide wave of disruptive circular innovation. Additionally, a new ‘Global Sustainability Skills for Action Initiative’ for large companies and SMEs around the world, will help the business and financial community across multiple markets build capacity within their own enterprises and with others, including governments and civil society, to better collaborate, partner and speed up the sustainability transformation.
About the Stockholm Action Agenda
The Stockholm Action Agenda is an unprecedented multi-stakeholder initiative involving over 70 global sustainability leaders from 34 expert organizations, international institutions and leading multinational businesses. It seeks to identify practical ways to overcome the biggest roadblocks that business and other stakeholders face in scaling sustainability fast across global value chains like mobility, electronics, the built environment, fashion and textiles, food and agriculture, and travel and tourism. The Stockholm Action Agenda has identified a set of three practical Action Priorities that will help businesses around the world transform the sustainability of global value chains much faster and at a bigger scale than today.
For more information and learn how to engage, please contact Clea Kaske-Kuck kaske-kuck@wbcsd.org
