(Expansion) – Climate change, social inequality, as well as the scarcity of food and natural resources represent some of the most important challenges of recent decades.
To reverse this situation, various global initiatives have been highlighted, such as the one led by the United Nations Organization in 2015: the Sustainable Development Goals; that established an agenda with specific goals to be met before 2030, that is, projecting a term of 15 years to solve these problems.
These goals represent a great challenge. The 2030 Agenda, as it is commonly called, sets out 17 goals that include 169 goals to meet. Although each country faces different issues, these points provide guidance to be applied to your particular context.
In Mexico, the Global Compact has promoted a series of close collaborations between private initiative, civil society, academia and government to establish actions and proposals that contribute to these objectives under a philosophy of cooperation and innovation through the creation of groups of work of the 2030 Agenda, which allow opening spaces that promote the exchange of ideas and facilitate the implementation of real and, above all, achievable projects.
The Mexico Global Compact and the Business Coordinating Council convened different strategic actors with the capacity and scope to transform projects into realities. An example of these interdisciplinary groups is the one focused on Ecosystems and Biodiversity, which addresses issues related to sustainable fishing, forest care and the promotion of regenerative agriculture.
According to the UN itself, more than 3,000 million people depend on marine and coastal biodiversity for their livelihood, and with respect to forests it is no different, with 1,600 million people depending on them.
Given this panorama, the Forests and Ecosystems group of the 2030 Agenda has established lines of action and implementation guides focused on helping small and medium-sized companies to implement practices that protect biodiversity, while contributing to improving the quality of life of small producers.
This includes providing them with access to training, in addition to sharing good practices in the marketing, sale and consumption of products, which allow them to encourage a more sustainable activity, with manuals at their disposal to address the main challenges such as food security, climate change, deforestation, among others.
Beyond the commitments established by the SDGs, with less than a decade to turn them into collective actions, we must embark on a new culture of sustainability, a philosophy that takes root in different spheres of companies and that, in the long term, is something that it will undoubtedly be incorporated into future business strategies, that it is a fundamental part of the creation of small and medium-sized companies and is vital for entrepreneurs when starting any project.
The Mexico Global Compact understood this premise and opened up the possibility of going beyond discourse. We are changing the course of history with concrete steps, with actions that today count and can be counted. The SDGs are a new opportunity to reverse the damage and turn it into a new chapter: regeneration, innovation and, above all, action.
Editor’s note: Lourdes Castañeda is General Director of Unilever Mexico and General Director of Unilever Latin America Nutrition. Follow her on . He has over 18 years of experience in marketing and sales. She is an industrial engineer, specializing in production management, from the Universidad Panamericana. The opinions published in this column belong exclusively to the author.
