Meeting the UN Global Goals

Jernkontoret, Stockholm Environment Institute

What do the UN Global Goals mean for the Swedish steel industry and vice versa? Do the goals represent an existential challenge given the industry’s considerable emissions, or do they offer opportunities for an innovative sector to develop the full societal potential of a recyclable and permanent material?

The Swedish steel industry have a positive impact on many more of the Global Goals than what first comes to mind – particularly when cross-linkages between the goals are considered.

The potentials for contributing to the Global Goals represent business opportunities. At the same time there are negative impacts requiring continuous attention and improvement. A methodology for gauging the societal value of products and processes is currently being developed to assist the industry to meet its 2050 vision. A fundamental point of departure has been to regard the Global Goals as a set of parameters that has to be seen as a whole, and where the impacts from products or processes are assessed across all the goals and targets.

This publication illustrates examples of interlinkages between the Global Goals and the Swedish steel industry focusing opportunities for ”smart steel” to contribute to achieving the Global Goals. As such, smart steel, in this context, is advanced, high performance materials designed to be optimal for a certain application could offer unique qualities that allows for e.g. lighter and stronger constructions, longer life spans and efficient recycling.

Jernkontoret and SEI collaboration

Jernkontoret and SEI collaborate on developing a societal value "compass" – a methodology and toolkit with which the industry as a whole, as well as individual producers, can evauate different options in terms of their impact on broader societal ambitions and goals. The compass will combine social capital accounting approaches with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) framework to quantify the societal value potentially created (or subtracted) by a given option, under conditions of future uncertainty. The methodology also uses cross-impact balance analysis to assess how progress on one SDG target may affect progress on others.
Learn more about this projekt.