Growth with moral compass way to achieving SDGs: Namrata Rana, director, Futurescape

All stakeholders should adopt the idea of an accelerate growth with a moral compass in order to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that have taken back the centre stage due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Namrata Rana, Director, strategy and brand, Futurescape and India’s ambassador to the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, has said.

“The planet needs a prime directive that serves as a moral compass and yet doesn’t derail growth. A 21st century ideal that binds us as people who have only one planet to live on. And this could perhaps be the philosophy of trusteeship that states that we are just trustees of the earth and we need to dream bigger and better,” Rana said while speaking at The Economic Times SDGs Summit 2020.

She added that while in the past few decades, capitalism has flourished across the world, everything else has been left behind. “The damage to environment has been immense and if they are allowed to go on unchecked, it can cause a huge amount of disruption to human life and businesses,” she explained.

Touching upon the importance of acting on SDGs, Rana said that the implementation of SDGs by 2030 requires an immense effort not only from government but businesses too. The Indian government is already using the SDGs as a road map for formulating national policies and regulations, she said, adding that it is therefore incumbent upon corporations to complement these actions.

She underlined that the Covid-19 pandemic has showed that financial growth and GDP measures still don’t account for many things that we value such as health, education, and environment among other things.

Giving the example of European taxonomy for ESG, she added that the ESG framework covering environment, social and governance issues has been adopted by many financial institutions across the world and they have performed exceedingly well.