25 September 2019: The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), The B Team and the World Benchmarking Alliance launched the ‘Business Avengers’ campaign. The campaign will focus on driving private sector awareness, collaboration and action in support of the SDGs.

The campaign will bring together 17 companies, each chosen to represent one of the 17 SDGs, to promote the ‘Decade of Delivery’ between 2020 and 2030, the deadline for achieving the SDGs. Each company will communicate the overall importance of the Goals, the opportunities the Goals represent and their efforts to help achieve them. So far, the Business Avengers include: Arm, Avanti, the Coca-Cola Company, Commvault, Diageo, Google.org, Mars, Mastercard, Microsoft, Nike, rb, SAP, salesforce, salesforce.org and Unilever. Together, these companies represent over USD500 billion in revenue and have 900,000 employees.

The campaign website shares tools and actions for companies to use in engaging their organization and employees in raising awareness on the SDGs. A letter from SDG leaders to businesses, for instance, outlines five things companies can do to advance the SDGs, from assessing the company’s impact against the SDGs and identifying related opportunities and risks across the company’s entire value chain, to sharing company goals to contribute to the SDGs with shareholders and other stakeholders. The website describes why the Goals matter to everyone, and underscores the importance of the SDGs for businesses’ future success around the world.

In a press release about joining the Business Avengers campaign, Diageo expresses its support for 2020 “as a year of activism to help shift the world onto a path to deliver the Goals by 2030.” The company reports that its 2020 Sustainability and Responsibility targets provide a framework to measure and track its progress and ensure it is actively contributing to achieving the SDGs. Diageo emphasizes that “one of the best ways we can contribute to communities is by engaging others” to become advocates for causes important to them and their stakeholders, and calls for increased collaboration to help shift the world onto a path to deliver the SDGs by 2030.

The campaign launch took place on 25 September 2019, on the sidelines of the SDG Summit at UN headquarters in New York, US. Project Everyone Co-Founder, Richard Curtis, explained that the world has made “nowhere near enough” progress to deliver on the promises made in 2015, in his remarks at the launch. He stressed the need for campaigns such as the Business Avengers to re-energize action “to fight poverty, inequality and the climate crisis.” [Campaign Website] [WBCSD Press Release] [Diageo Press Release]