Die EU in der Welt

2020 has bluntly forced the world to recognize the need to accelerate the journey towards climate neutrality and the urgency for the adoption of an inclusive approach to the green, digital, and demographic transition. The pandemic and its fallout exposed deep divisions within society, affecting the most vulnerable people. Already in 2015, the Paris Agreement recognized how shifting towards a resilient, carbon-neutral, digital economy would boost prosperity and drive net job creation in the long-term. However, for this transition to succeed, climate action needs to go hand in hand with social justice. In this context, businesses have a key responsibility and role to play to embed societal concerns in their governance, priorities, models and in their approach to investments and finance. Business transformation requires more than individual company efforts. Industry sector dialogues and alliances, impact-oriented actions and new forms of PPPs are key to bring change in our ecosystems and to enhance the livelihoods of citizens, workers, and consumers. This is what the European Pact for Sustainable Industry is all about: a duty to collaborate within and between all industry sectors and federations to make the European Green Deal and the UN SDGs a success. 2021 seems to be the year of due diligence. The respect for human rights, environmental protection and inclusion is expressed through various EU policies and proposals for regulation: e.g. a Sustainable Corporate Governance Initiative, that will include a mandatory corporate environmental and human rights due diligence, the Revision of the Directive on Non-Financial Reporting Directive, a future EU Social Taxonomy. This should reinforce the geopolitical role of the European Commission in a period in which the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the vulnerability of Europe’s supply chains and shown how critical it is to support the most vulnerable across the whole value chain. In this session we will test how much the EU is willing to go beyond corporate compliance through the new due diligence legislation and decide on strategic accompanying measures to support continuous transformation of supply chains and collaborative efforts for long-standing impact of the eco-systems companies are sourcing from. The real challenge is two-fold: to build a larger playing field on due diligence at the European and international level and to empower actors and industry federations to develop collaborative solutions that can enhance the livelihoods of workers, farmers and miners. Why you should join • If you want to better understand how the policy developments and the move towards more transparency will substantially change how multinational companies address the impact of their value chain; • If you want to listen to people in the field on what they expect from companies sustainable supply chain efforts. • If you want to hear from leading companies and initiatives how their due diligence approaches lead to change and impact and not only to assurance; • If you want to know how the Due Diligence legislation can drive impact and change when made coherent with other policies on trade, development, public procurement, sustainable finance (future EU Social Taxonomy), and corporate non-financial disclosure; • If you want to learn about international collaborative platforms and alliances that transform value chains beyond due diligence through sector dialogues and scalable capacity building of local ecosystems.