SDGs vs ESGs: What is the Better Measure of Sustainability?

What is the ESG Measure of Sustainability?
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- Environmental criteria consider how a company performs as a steward of nature.
- Social criteria examine how it manages relationships with employees, suppliers, customers, and the communities where it operates.
- Governance deals with a company’s leadership, executive pay, audits, internal controls, and shareholder rights.”
Brokerage firms and mutual funds now use ESG ratings to guide “sustainable investing”. Unfortunately, ESG criteria may not be the measure needed to define sustainability. In the article The World May Be Better Off Without ESG Investing the Stanford Social Innovation Review argues that “the bar for what constitutes a good corporate citizen is abysmally low and may have made ESG investing, arguably the hottest trend in investing today, a greater force for destabilizing society and the planet than if it didn’t exist at all.”
What is the SDG Measure of Sustainability?
A New, Objective Measure of Sustainability
A group of LexisNexis patent search experts objectively mapped technology areas with active patenting activity to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, their targets, and their 231 unique indicators. Searches and search topics for this mapping are based on the goals, indicators and metadata of the individual UN SDGs. In an iterative approach, all underlying searches were reviewed and modified according to their results regarding SDG compliance before finally being implemented into the PatentSight® analytics tool.
The SDG patent mapping helps corporations through:
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- Measurability: Patent data is an important source to measure a company’s contribution to a sustainable world. Innovation has been identified as a key contributor to more sustainability.
- Transparency: Including patent data in the SDG evaluation process helps to shed more light on the effort companies put into becoming SDG compliant and avoids “green washing”.
- Valuation: Patent data in combination with the Patent Asset Index™ reveals real champions and allows stakeholder as well as shareholder a better decision-making process.
- Accessibility: PatentSight has mapped its global patent database to SDG-related tech-fields. This enables non-patent experts to easily access their fields of interest and gain valuable insights for their analyses.
Watch the On-Demand Webinar Calling for Action: How to Track and Measure Sustainable Innovation and Investments to learn how you can gain an unparalleled view into the global innovation landscape and empower decision-making for opportunities in sustainable technology.
Read When IP Meets Sustainability: Mapping Patents to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to learn more.
*There are four SDGs not directly connected to technology and thus cannot be associated with patents.
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