Lise Kingo on five years at UN Global Compact and the road ahead

WASHINGTON — Lise Kingo has spent the past five years at the helm of United Nations Global Compact, the world’s largest corporate sustainability initiative, and the biggest challenge she sees today in getting companies to play their part in addressing the Sustainable Development Goals is moving them from awareness to action, she told Devex in an interview. Kingo took up the job just before the SDGs were officially adopted in 2015 and since then has been focused on “creating awareness and action around the global goals,” she said. Kingo said she is proud of the work UN Global Compact has done in creating platforms for business action around climate, gender equality, and finance, getting organizations to commit to targets and providing tools to track their progress. But she said the next big challenge is pushing companies to translate knowledge into action. That will be a task for her successor in the job, Sanda Ojiambo, who started as UN Global Compact’s CEO this week as Kingo stepped down. “The big issue is that we have a gap between the awareness and sort of knowing what to do and then what is actually happening on the ground. And I think that's the next big challenge that needs to be addressed,” Kingo told Devex. A 2019 survey found that 99% of CEOs from companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenues believe that sustainability will be important to the future success of their business. And increasingly, sustainability is an issue where CEOs are taking a lead — about 73% of companies have CEOs who are involved in and leading on sustainability efforts and the global goals, up from 49% in 2015, according to a different UN Global Compact survey. “The global goals have really driven that. Sustainable business has become a much more strategic agenda that sits with the CEO and with the board of the company, to some extent,” Kingo said. Still, while companies believe that business should make a real impact on the SDGs, only 21% say business is currently playing a critical role in contributing to the goals, according to the 2019 survey. This year, UN Global Compact launched the new SDG Ambition initiative to help companies take action. It creates benchmarks that are more ambitious than those that most companies are currently setting on issues ranging from climate change and gender equality to corruption, as well as tools to help companies implement and measure progress, Kingo said. “We really need to beef up the level of ambition in companies to see the needle move,” she said. “So we are trying to create a set of standardized goals coming from the UN Global Compact that we want to see as part of the new business normal for companies.” While leadership at the top is important, companies are “not properly anchoring goals and principles in the way they run their business” and need to incorporate these goals in their research, production, finance, and human resources strategies, she said. “Sustainable business has become a much more strategic agenda that sits with the CEO and with the board of the company, to some extent.” --— Lise Kingo, former CEO, UN Global Compact UN Global Compact is cooperating with other organizations that are already creating standards for benchmarks and metrics, such as by working with the Science Based Targets Initiative on climate goals. It also collaborated with B Lab — the organization aiming to make business a force for good, in part through the B Corporation certification — to develop the SDG Action Manager, a tool that helps companies track how they perform on the global goals and the Ten Principles of the UN Global Compact. While the COVID-19 crisis has further exposed “the gaps and weaknesses in the world” and many businesses have taken a hit, there is still an opportunity to engage them in addressing the SDGs, Kingo said. “It’s really important that when we kick-start the economy. … we take the opportunity to basically reset everything we are doing and start working much more from the 2030 Agenda [for Sustainable Development] and the Paris Agreement,” she said. As the development community looks to engage with businesses, it needs to speak a language they understand about risks, opportunities, and how achieving these objectives can help companies innovate, Kingo said. This is the approach that UN Global Compact has taken, and it seems to have worked, she added.