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In January 2016, the United Nations issued 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) with 169 actionable targets as a blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future by 2030. These UN SDGs address global challenges including those related to poverty, inequality, climate, environmental degradation, prosperity, and peace and justice and reflect the ideal that development everywhere must integrate economic growth, social well-being and environmental protection. Although 100’s of countries and private companies have committed to the UN SDGs, it is not always obvious how a typical environmental remediation project can contribute to achieving these goals.
To address this challenge, the Jacobs project and client team identified the most effective, relevant, and practical sustainability opportunities and metrics based on a specific project, aligning remedial actions to the UN SDGs. Meetings and workshops were conducted to benchmark and measure sustainability performance based on indicator performance, geographic region, industry sector for each UN SDG. The methodology is replicable and scalable, facilitating the identification of core sustainable priorities for remediation and other projects.
Evolve - Unlock success in sustainability through smarter project scoping (6).pdfThis presentation reviews a remediation project at a manufacturing facility in the United States with soil and groundwater contamination where this methodology was used to align project goals with UN SDGs and corporate sustainability goals. Although the approach can be adapted to project type, project scale, and team needs, the following is a general overview of the process used in this example:
Step 1: Team and stakeholder survey to identify material priorities and areas of most importance on the topics of economy, society, and environment relative to the remediation project.
Step 2: Facilitated team discussions to confirm project-specific material priorities and identify opportunities and actions to address project sustainability.
Step 3: Define goals and measures of success (qualitative and quantitative) that the remediation project would achieve when implemented.
Step 4: Review and dashboard remediation project performance with respect to UN SDGs and corporate sustainability goals.
Step 5: Re-evaluate periodically during from project conception to completion to demonstrate progress in achieving sustainability goals.
A successful linkage was achieved between planned remediation activities at the subject site, achievement of UN SDGs and progress in achieving corporate sustainability goals. The process demonstrated the inherently broad scope of sustainability opportunities aligned to remediation projects and the potential for significant variance from project to project, and further supports the importance of addressing sustainability at a project level. The need to address sustainability and communicate clearly to stakeholders is anticipated to become common business practice. The approach employed during this case example demonstrates a viable and streamlined process that enables project teams to qualitatively and quantitatively measure progress toward sustainability through UN SDGs during all phases of remedial projects including alternative evaluation, remedial design, and post-remedy implementation and clearly communicate this progress to project and corporate stakeholders.
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