Packed with 40 practical tools and frameworks, plus global case studies and company insights, this publication equips organizations to embed sustainability across the procurement lifecycle. It highlights how collaboration between buyers and suppliers, including SMEs, is central to success. Finally, it explores the shifting landscape of regulatory demands, business risks, and market opportunities, positioning procurement as a strategic lever for advancing ESG priorities and sustainable growth. Available in English and Spanish.

Provides practical advice, flags key considerations, and outlines good practice steps for designing and implementing effective grievance mechanisms. The publication series supports business to know how to better hear and address instances of modern slavery.

Publication offers a basis for understanding the expectations set out in the UN Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights in relation to grievance mechanisms. While implementing effective grievance mechanisms to tackle modern slavery remains challenging, businesses can utilise the case studies, that draw on types of grievance mechanisms used across a range of sectors, in the publication to design and implement their own effective grievance mechanisms.

Identifies practices that businesses can implement to advance decent work and improve occupational safety and health (OSH) globally. Co-developed by the United Nations Global Compact and the International Labour Organization, the brief focuses on the role that businesses can play in ensuring safe and healthy workplaces, especially when operating in countries with deficient national safety and health and employment injury protection schemes. It further recognizes the important link between sound OSH practices and effective employment injury insurance schemes: the most desirable mechanisms to protect the incomes of workers who suffer work-related injuries and cover their medical costs.

The Improving Wages to Advance Decent Work in Supply Chains microsite highlights lessons learned and best practices from companies and organizations on tackling low pay in supply chains. The microsite is not a blueprint for living wages in global supply chains but provides a strategic logic to support companies’ decision making, to devise their own realistic, integrated strategy on tackling low pay in supply chains and chart their way forward with a plan of concrete implementation actions that enable their commitments. For more resources on living wage, please refer to our living wage webpage. (https://www.unglobalcompact.org/what-is-gc/our-work/livingwages)

The Decent Work Toolkit for Sustainable Procurement will enable companies, procurement professionals and suppliers to develop a common understanding on how to advance decent work through purchasing decisions and scaling up efforts to improve lives around the globe. With a focus on trust and transparency, the Decent Work Toolkit for Sustainable Procurement is publicly available to all and contains real-life examples of buyers and suppliers jointly addressing decent work concerns in global supply chains.

Updated version Within the Peer Learning Group Climate of the German Global Compact Network (DGCN), companies explored the challenges associated with developing climate targets, and discussed possible solutions, methods and applications with experts and representatives from the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi). This publication summarizes core findings of the discussion and proposes solutions to challenges. The focus is on the selection of a method for developing a science-based GHG emission reduction path, the interpretation of results, the criteria of the SBTi for an official approval of science-based targets, and the treatment of scope 3 emissions. Thereby, the paper serves as a compact introduction science-based target setting.

This guidance identifies the main improvements required for gender-sensitive social auditing and provides recommendations, practical advice, and relevant examples on how to effectively integrate gender considerations into audits.

The publication highlights the potential role of social dialogue in fostering stability, equity, productivity, sustainable enterprises and inclusive growth. It also showcases some successful examples.

Businesses today recognize both the business and social imperative of respecting human rights. Often, companies struggle to identify and implement meaningful action to address risks to trade union rights in their global value chains. Included in this resource is a diagnostic tool in Part 2.2 to help companies assess where and why they might face heightened risks to trade union rights.  The resource also highlights a range of practical steps companies can take depending on the risk factors that are present. Additionally, it showcases eight examples of how real companies have approached trade union rights in practice.  

Building on the original Guide for General Counsel on Corporate Sustainability published in 2015, Version 2.0 provides further guidance to General Counsel to ensure they are better placed and better equipped to drive change and deliver value to their organizations through an increased focus on corporate sustainability. Topics include: Corporate Sustainability and Business Integrity Corporate Sustainability and Business Integrity Human Rights and Supply Chain Due Diligence Corporate Sustainability and Grievance Mechanisms Challenges to Corporate Sustainability - Managing a Crisis Please fill out the form below to download the full guide.

This guide aims to help companies set effective site water targets that are informed by catchment context, which can create value and lessen risks for the company and support collective action. This guide is intended for site staff or technical water specialists responsible for water management, and relevant corporate staff. This guide lays out three key elements for setting effective site water targets: Water targets should respond to priority water challenges within the catchment; The ambition of water targets should be informed by the site’s contribution to water challenges and desired conditions; and Water targets should reduce water risk, capitalize on opportunities, and contribute to public sector priorities.