It's hard to imagine bigger, bolder, more ambitious goals than the Sustainable
Development Goals. End poverty, zero hunger, or wellbeing for all at all ages, to name just a few.
But these can seem pretty impossible for some people to achieve.
So how do you galvanise people towards goals that seem so unattainable?
It's very ambitious, but it is very exciting, and it did take four years for us to shape. And
that's because we really have a conversation with the world about what does it take for a country
to go from a trajectory of abject poverty and poor human development indices to one where there
is the prosperity and peace and respect for human rights? How do we how we put all that together?
What's your assessment of where we are, as a result of this past year with a pandemic,
and the very disparate impact that's had on different communities?
When we launched the decade, we were off track to achieving the SDGs. And so what we did find
ourselves doing was treating development as an emergency, taking the framework of the SDGs and
saying, this needs to be put on steroids. And we need to move this fast to the right investments.
And really, the new angle itself came together, but so did the world.
There is a silver lining and Covid, and that is that we are all conscious
about having to make investments today that could actually help us to recover better.
When you think about the range of sustainability initiatives across IKEA, they're so wide ranging.
What's the criteria for determining which ones you will pursue?
It's basically starting with that you need to measure your carbon footprint and know
the impact that you have across your value chain. Secondly,
I would say it's about going for the actions that has the biggest impact.
Why is cross sector collaboration so important for moving the needle on this?
What we stand before is actually a transformation of society at large, the infrastructure of
mobility, of energy, of consumption. And thereby, each one of us will be slightly too small to take
the lead in every topic. So, we need to work in between competitors. We need to work in
value chains, from end to end. And we need to work together with governments in order to make
sure we have speed in incentivising the right investments and behaviours that we need to see.
Do you think there's going to be a different view of innovation? Because, traditionally,
innovation by companies is something that you'd want to keep for yourself as a competitive edge,
but in sustainability, it seems like if we actually want to move the world, we should be
sharing every sustainability innovation that we can find as broadly as possible.
I think so. I think before we were thinking, how do we protect the uniqueness of a company
by locking others out of it? I think now we protect our companies by having speed,
we protect our companies by being relevant for our customers and coworkers, and thereby,
to work in your own funnel and not collaborate with others, will also have a price to pay.
Climate action today as a very real ask of global leaders, because the change that is happening as
a result of climate, not just the disasters that we're seeing that ever more frequent and harsh,
but in fact that the recovery is so much more difficult.
And so we've got to put investments in to prevent, to adapt, and, of course,
really huge investments and mitigation to get those targets that we would like by 2050.