Grundfos is on board ‘Spaceship Earth’

17 global companies have the word in a new report, called “Future of Spaceship Earth”. The matter at hand is the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), and the realistic perspectives in achieving them by 2030. A common denominator for the companies contributing is that they are global leaders within each field discussed, and that they are driving extraordinary progress on each of the global goals.

The forecast is collected and published by the Norwegian certification body DNV GL, which is also known for its work in collecting and sharing the Global Opportunity Report, which spots opportunities for sustainability and prosperity. They conclude that businesses are decisively important to gain traction on the SDGs.

“For the most part, business has the technology, people and processes to rock the world. The challenge, therefore, isn’t the ‘smarts’, it’s the take-up of the solutions proposed and piloted – the real scaling of these interventions,” says Remi Eriksen, Group President & CEO of DNV GL.

The report foresees substantial challenges in meeting the universal goals by 2030, but also highlights that traction is good on several parameters. Especially if the learnings drawn from companies such as Unilever, Siemens, Danone and Grundfos, who are all contributing in the report, are used.

Grundfos is focusing on SDG 6: Clean water and sanitation for all by 2030. This is an important and difficult challenge to solve, and today 663 million people lack access to water, while 2.4 billion do not have access to sanitation.

“The SDGs are tremendously important and very ambitious goals. To reach them, it is necessary that we all, together, pull our weight. Spanning the political-, societal- and business-spheres. What is interesting is not what we can do on our own, but what we can do together. And because of that, it makes sense to us to contribute alongside other businesses, providing feasible models that can help us move the world in a better and more sustainable direction,” says Mads Nipper, CEO and Group President at Grundfos and Commissioner of the Business & Sustainable Development Commission.

The full report was launched at the UN headquarters in New York on September 19th.