These are young people’s top sustainability goals

Young people today are part of the largest youth population cohort in history: 1.8 billion and counting. The vast majority of those young people live in developing countries where access to basic resources is a daily challenge. In light of that challenge, PwC’s 2024 Global Youth Outlook asked 2,209 people from 43 countries between the ages of 10 and 30 to share their views on the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals, a set of objectives published in 2015 as part of the global body’s push for a more sustainable world.

When respondents were asked to rank those 17 goals in importance, clean water and sanitation came in at number one, for the second year in a row, edging out clean energy and climate action. The finding would seem to signal that tomorrow’s leaders are telling today’s leaders that they’d better bump these two elemental human needs way up in their list of sustainability priorities.

Are businesses prepared to do so? The picture is encouraging, if mixed. Roughly two-thirds of respondents to PwC’s 2024 Global CSRD Survey, which polled business leaders on how they’re implementing the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, expressed confidence in their company’s ability to meet the reporting requirements on water and marine resources. A comparable share expressed confidence on the related topics of pollution, biodiversity and ecosystems. Those findings suggest that many corporate leaders have a relatively accurate view of how their company’s activities affect natural systems like aquifers and waterways, which can be crucial to clean water supplies and sanitation services. By contrast, only 45% percent of executives in PwC’s 27th Annual Global CEO Survey said their company has begun or completed investments in nature-based climate solutions, such as wetlands rehabilitation and restorative agriculture, practices that can also have benefits for water supplies. This points to a gap between business action and the most urgent needs of a significant share of the world’s population.

Closing that gap starts with collecting real-time data on activities, such as land use and the release of pollutants, that can affect sanitation systems and water supplies up and down the company’s value chain. Doing that can require a major investment in data infrastructure, including centralised data storage systems. Sustainability teams can get an assist from resources such as the ENCORE database, designed to help investors and regulators assess companies’ environmental impacts, and Aqueduct, an open-source tool that maps water risks. Regulations and standards can serve as useful guides, too. Many of the provisions in the CSRD, as well as those in the Task Force on Nature Related Financial Disclosures, contain prescriptions on nature-focused sustainability action. 

Understanding your company’s water and sanitation impacts, and making moves to limit those impacts, will help give the next generation the momentum to spur meaningful change of their own.