The Agenda 2030 Compass shows promise as a way of assessing the potential value to a sustainable future of strategic decisions. It was developed and tested as part of an ongoing collaboration between SEI, Jernkontoret (the Swedish Steel Producers’ Association) and Swedish steel producers.
While most efforts related to the 2030 Agenda have focused on picking a few key SDGs and then measuring progress to date, the Compass takes a future-oriented approach, assessing the likely systemic effects of a planned action across all SDGs, and compares these effects to a baseline or to other options.
The project provided a proof of the concept behind the Compass, bringing together policymakers, key actors from a heavy manufacturing industry and its key stakeholders in co-creation processes to discuss and assess concrete options for contributing to the SDGs.
While the Agenda 2030 Compass has been developed in collaboration with the steel industry, the methodology can be applied in any industrial or government sector. This is the point of departure for a subsequent project that started in 2019, where the methodology, the modelling and the data inputs will be further developed, and verified through testing, with the aim of launching a fully functional model that can be used by any actor.
