Measuring business impacts on the SDGs: a systematic literature review

Abstract

The private sector must play a central role in advancing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To fulfill their duty, businesses must rely on accurate methodologies for measuring their impact on the SDGs. Since they were established, tools for evaluating companies' impact on the goals have proliferated. Over the last few years, there has been an increasing interest from academia in the evaluation of business impacts on the SDGs. The current study undertakes a systematic literature review to investigate the state-of-the-art of academic research on corporate SDG impact measurement. The review sampled 30 articles published between 2015 and 2022. Relying on qualitative content analysis and descriptive statistics, this study investigates the scope, purpose, main findings, and publication data of the articles of the sample, aiming to provide some structure to this novel field of research. Furthermore, this work identifies relevant gaps in the literature, providing some insights for future research.