News 19 January 2022

SDG2000: the 2,000 most influential companies in 2022

Seven years after the creation of the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the coronavirus pandemic has reinforced the fragility of our systems, widening inequality by leaving too many people behind. Even prior to the pandemic, the world was not on track to achieve the 2030 Agenda.

As pointed out recently in the World Economic Forum (WEF) report Global Risks 2022, the climate and social crises as well as biodiversity loss top this year’s list of global risks by severity. However, the biggest risk is ‘inaction’, WEF warned.

In 2022, the world still lacks a mechanism to hold the private sector accountable on their impact to planet and people. Many companies avoid their responsibility and don’t take the urgent actions needed. Those that do live up to their responsibility are not rewarded accordingly by society.

For companies to support the transformations needed to put our planet and society in a truly sustainable path, substantial changes must be made to the way in which they operate – ones that put people at the heart of any decisions made. There must be also a change how we all work together as part of the ecosystem so that companies are enabled to move in this direction through the right incentives and policies. Explore WBA transformations

new WBA system wheel 2021

With that mission in mind, the World Benchmarking Alliance was founded to incentivise responsible business practices that underpin inclusive and equitable economies and enable systems transformations that happen in a way that leaves no one behind. Read more about WBA mission

Holding companies accountable does require doing the hard, often unseen and ‘unglamorous’ work of collaborating, driven by the understanding that only collectively will achieve the targets for sustainable development in 2030.

Every January since 2020, the World Benchmarking Alliance publishes the SDG2000 list, which outlines the 2000 companies that have the most influence in contributing to the achievement of the SDGs.

Explore the SDG2000 interactive list

What's new in this year's list?

The SDG2000 list identifies the 2,000 most impactful companies across the seven systems transformations. These companies are headquartered in 85 countries around the world, from Argentina to Vietnam and operate in industries as varied as apparel, asset managers, agricultural products, telecommunications and waste management. The companies have a combined revenue of $36.5 trillion and employ at around 97 million people.

The 2022 iteration of the SDG2000 has undergone some changes due reasons such as revised methodologies and refined benchmark scopes, changes in keystone metrics such as revenue and number of employees, and mergers and acquisitions.

WBA’s mission is to build a movement to measure and incentivise business impact towards a sustainable future that works for everyone. In line with this, the 2022 SDG2000 sees 41% of companies on the list headquartered in developing countries.

The pivot from circular to the nature and biodiversity transformation is another key change to the SDG2000. In the 2019 systems transformations report, WBA identified the circular transformation as one of the systems that needed to be transformed. As announced in the 2021 systems transformation report, we have come to recognise the need for greater understanding, transparency and scrutiny of business impact on nature and biodiversity. This goes beyond circular strategies to achieve resource decoupling and requires actions to transform value chains and advance biodiversity both within and beyond businesses’ own footprint. Focusing on nature stewardship allows for more attention on the impact, rather than the means, and aligns better with the work others are undertaking to improve business’ impact on nature. To fit and achieve this new vision the circular company list underwent a heavy rescoping.

Back for a second year, we researched the connections between 17 of our Allies and 1755 companies. The companies in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean are all covered by at least one WBA Ally. This is in contrast companies in East Asia, Europe and North America regions which jointly include the uncovered companies. In addition, we found that the more Allies companies engage with, the more likely they are to perform well in WBA benchmarks.

More research insights will be published in February here. In the meantime we invite you to explore the SDG2000 interactive list or download the raw data set.

Download the SDG2000 data set