The Global Goals: Our Commitment and Actions
By Lara Birkes, HPE’s Chief Sustainability Officer and Vice President, Living Progress
A turbulent economy and global forces, such as climate change and poverty, have created pressing social challenges that demand urgent action.
In response, 193 world leaders signed-on to the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—also called the Global Goals—to implement a 2030 vision for improving the health of our planet, and the livelihood of its inhabitants.
Alongside government business has an important implementing role to play, and HPE is committed to doing its part. Last week in Davos, the Business and Sustainable Development Commission launched its new report, ‘Better Business, Better World,’ making the case that achieving the Global Goals is not just a responsibility, but also opens new avenues for business growth.
Given these opportunities to align strategy with societal impact, we’ve identified four goals that most significantly sync with our business, and to which we feel we can make the greatest contribution.
HPE is working to help advance Affordable and Clean Energy (Goal 7), which is essential to building a low-carbon economy to support our world for generations to come. One way we do this is through our RE100 commitment to reach 100% renewable energy, while setting an interim goal to source 50% of our total energy consumption from renewable sources by 2025.
HPE firmly believes all workers must be treated with dignity and respect. Decent Work and Economic Growth (Goal 8) reinforces our values and aligns with the role we play tackling the root causes of forced labor and human trafficking. Our respected Supply Chain Responsibility (SCR) program empowers and protects the rights of the workers making and delivering our products. This long history of leadership was recently honored with the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s Stop Slavery Award for Transparency and Response to Challenges.
At HPE, we understand our complete carbon footprint and take a value-chain approach to mitigate. We know that the use of our products represents the largest share (53%) of our greenhouse gas emissions. What’s more, the majority of that footprint—mostly related to carbon and water from energy consumption—gets transferred to our customers during the use phase of our products. We work in support of Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure (Goal 9) by delivering environmentally sustainable IT through transformative products such as ProLiant servers, which enable up to 20% energy savings. We are committed to increasing the energy performance of our product portfolio by 30x from a 2015 baseline by 2025.
As a strong advocate of the Paris Climate Agreement, we understand the vital role business plays in its implementation. HPE supports Climate Action (Goal 13) across our global operations, and in December 2016 we announced a new goal to reduce our operational greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 25% by 2025 from a 2015 baseline. This target is in line with what climate science says is necessary to keep global warming below 2°C, and has been approved by the Science Based Target Initiative. HPE is also a proud signatory of the Low Carbon USA statement by the U.S. business and investor community.
One of HPE’s greatest strengths is the passion and energy of its employees. For this reason, we’ve linked the initiatives of HPE Gives, our global volunteering and cash match program, to the Global Goals, knowing the incredible impact localized community engagement has when aggregated collectively. We’re also a collaborating partner of Impact 2030, the only private-sector led coalition aligning employee volunteer programs to meet these long-term societal objectives.
The need for urgent action is clear. HPE stands with the international community in supporting the implementation of these Global Goals—to protect the planet and ensure a better future for all.
