Impact on sustainable development

As a large company, we create value across society in a number of ways, from our daily presence at millions of front doors, through the people who work for and with us, and the communities we serve. We believe that being a responsible business partner and a good employer, ensuring fair compensation, safeguarding labour and human rights, stimulating diversity & inclusion, preventing discrimination, and protecting privacy, while focusing on the needs of all our stakeholders, including our shareholders, have helped us become the company we are today. Our strategy also focuses on the long-term value we create and on a broader range of societal topics. We have based the output and outcomes of our value creation model on our key material topics and linked these to our longer-term impact on the UN's Sustainable development goals (SDGs), as highlighted in the infographic.

SDG impact

Our focus and our progress

We have identified four focus SDGs that our business activities have the greatest impact on. From our own operations, decent work and economic growth (SDG 8) is our most relevant SDG, followed by climate action (SDG 13). Through collaboration along our value chain, we focus on making progress on industry, innovation and infrastructure (SDG 9) and responsible consumption and production (SDG 12). Because all SDGs are interrelated, the actions we take to make headway with our four focus SDGs impact all other SDGs. We have developed our approach towards our focus SDGs and identified relevant interrelations between other SDGs based on specific SDG sub targets, as defined by the United Nations (UN). We have mapped the material topics to the focus SDGs and the contribution they make to the linked SDGs, as seen in the table below. More information about our contribution to the SDGs can be found in 'Non-financial statements'