Sectoral Sustainability Research of Özyeğin University-TUSİAD Sustainable Development Forum is in the Voluntary National Report

The Government of Turkey presented its 2nd Voluntary National Review (VNR) report on July 15, 2019 at the United Nations High-level Political Forum (HLPF) in New York.

The report provides a review of Turkey’s progress towards Sustainable Development Goals and integration of SDGs into national agenda. The VNRs aim to facilitate the sharing of experiences, including successes, challenges and lessons learned, with a view to accelerating the implementation of the 2030 Agenda.

The Sectoral Sustainability Research conducted by Özyeğin University- TUSİAD Sustainable Development Forum has been included as one of the best practices contributing to Sustainable Development Goal 9-Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure.

This project aims to collect firm level sustainability information, aggregate this data to sectoral level and conduct analyses to determine the best policies for Turkey’s sustainable development.

To this end, a methodology is developed to objectively measure sustainability and companies are assessed based on their environmental, corporate social responsibility, corporate governance, employee rights, human rights and product and supply chain management practices. The assessment relies on content analysis on publically disclosed reports such as sustainability reports, corporate responsibility reports, annual reports and corporate governance compliance reports of manufacturing companies listed in BIST. We Thereby, qualitative information on social and environmental sustainability is transformed into quantitative information and systematic and structural data will be gathered, which is an important gap in Turkey.  Firm level sustainability information is consolidated to sectoral level environmental, social and economic sustainability of manufacturing sector is evaluated.

One of the foreseen impact of this project is an increase in the number of companies disclosing integrated reports and improve reporting quality. United Nations Sustainable Development Target 12.6 reads as “Encourage companies, especially large and transnational companies, to adopt sustainable practices and to integrate sustainability information into their reporting cycle”.  Besides Sustainable Development Goal 9-Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure-Sectoral Sustainability Research contributes to this specific target. Moreover, the project serves the UN’ s “Leave no one behind” motto, since companies have been assessed in terms of elimination of forced labor and child labor, non- discrimination on gender, disability or age and compliance with principles of relevant international standards.

More information on Sectoral Sustainability Research is available here.