The reporting of sustainable development goals: is the integrated approach the missing link?

This commentary argues that the integrated thinking could support the simultaneous consideration of different stakeholders' groups to ensure that the SDGs can be achieved as a whole. Prior research, indeed, has argued that social and environmental accounting should put forward actions against unsustainability. Recent literature and international bodies report action to mitigate the negative impacts of unsustainability globally, such as the introduction of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to set an agenda for the implementation of sustainable development. The implementation of the SDGs has not thus far resulted in the expected outcomes, since there is a lack of focus on how to identify interdependencies among different goals. Integration in SDGs has emerged as an approach to promote actions in this regard, but only a limited number of studies have put forward how integrated reporting and thinking can support the implementation of actions and the monitoring of their progress. Therefore, a paradigm shift in the implementation of an integrated approach in monitoring sustainable development worldwide should be promoted. This could have economic, financial and business consequences; for instance, to support national development plans by creating national financing frameworks, to improve internal decision making and information for investors, to effectively engage the public in sustainability practices such as a Green New Deal and to enhance the perspective of both public and private sector. The adoption of integrated reporting (IR) can describe the value creation process of an organization, by considering the influence of the external environment, relationships, and various resources. By including the concept of sustainable development, the revised IR Framework can be translated at various levels of analysis, by helping firms, local authorities, countries, or other stakeholders in developing proper strategies to improve their process of sustainable development creation. Areas for fruitful future research can be addressed to identify those interdependencies among goals that could effectively enable the SDGs to be universal, indivisible, and interlinked. A further call for research could be focused on what interconnections in the SDGs could be developed across sectors, societal actors, and between and among low, medium, and high-income countries.