Science, Standards, and Sustainability: Ensuring Verified Impact for the SDGs

This session explores how industry can move to the centre of global transformation, advancing the SDGs and the UN Pact for the Future through measurable, science-based action. It will emphasize the importance of auditing, verification, and standards in ensuring transparency and accountability across corporate and financing practices. Rooted in UN processes, the discussion will also examine alignment with the EU’s Multiannual Financial Framework, including the Nature Credits Roadmap, to scale policy and financing innovations for global, nature-positive investment.

Convened by TÜV SÜD

As the international community accelerates progress on the UN Pact for the Future and begins to shape the post-2030 development agenda, the role of industry must evolve significantly. Businesses across all sectors can no longer remain on the margins of sustainable development efforts; they must move to the centre of global transformation. This session will examine how the private sector can act as a strategic partner in advancing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and in contributing meaningfully to the implementation of the Pact for the Future.

A central theme will be the need to ensure that commitments translate into measurable outcomes. To achieve this, companies must embed robust systems for auditing, verification, and standards development. The UN system has consistently underscored the importance of integrity, transparency, and accountability in sustainable investment, and this session will explore how those principles can be operationalised in corporate strategies. By aligning business practices with science-based standards, industry can reinforce the credibility of multilateral processes while bridging the gap between high-level policy ambition and on-the-ground implementation.

While the session’s primary focus remains on advancing UN processes, it will also consider opportunities for policy and financing alignment with the European Union’s evolving frameworks, particularly the Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) for 2028–2034. The European Commission’s Roadmap towards Nature Credits, published on 7 July 2025, provides a timely and practical example of how regional policy innovation can reinforce UN goals. The roadmap outlines a voluntary market mechanism designed to reward nature-positive actions by issuing certified, tradable credits to farmers, foresters, and land managers. It emphasises the need for science-based and auditable standards to ensure credibility, transparent governance to build trust, and public seed funding to de-risk early investments and attract private capital. Crucially, nature restoration is positioned not as an optional activity but as a core component of economic and financial systems.

Within the MFF, the EU has committed to dedicating 10% of its budget to biodiversity by 2026–2027 and to doubling its external biodiversity spending to €7 billion. This opens new opportunities for cooperation between the UN and the EU, whereby MFF allocations can be leveraged to co-finance sustainable development projects aligned with UN priorities. Equally important is the potential to align verification methodologies across the two systems, creating shared standards that can support the credibility and scalability of sustainable investment worldwide.

The session will therefore highlight the possibility of bringing European pilots in nature-positive investment into the UN policy space. By doing so, participants will explore how such models can be scaled globally, ensuring that both the UN and the EU contribute to the creation of robust, credible, and high-integrity market instruments. The EU’s emphasis on verification, transparency, and science-based standards mirrors the UN’s own requirements for integrity in sustainable development. By embedding the EU’s nature-credit framework into UN discussions, mutual reinforcement of safeguards and governance structures becomes possible.