Day 1 - 2021
Inaugural
HLP 1: Examining Our Willingness and Ability to Drive Transformative Change
The inaugural session for ISS 2021 saw an esteemed panel discuss the need for urgent climate action and collaboration to prepare for future shocks. The need to transition towards cleaner energy systems for a greener future were also highlighted along with the role to be played by all the stakeholders involved in the process.
This high level plenary questions our understanding of ‘Transformative Change’ as embedded in the 2030 Agenda. It also examines the role measurements play to produce desirable changes in complex systems as well as the checks and balances we should have in place to mitigate unintended consequences of wrong/incomplete measurements/metrics.
HLP2: Enabling Business Contribution towards a Resilient Society
Plenary: India’s Taxonomy: Defining Sustainable Economic Activities
The second high level plenary seeks to understand how businesses balance the trade-offs between competitiveness, growth and social/environmental impacts in the recovery phase while also discussing opportunities to integrate the needs and aspirations of SMEs in the recovery process. The enabling factors supporting ‘business unusual’ to achieve measurable positive impacts on lives, livelihoods and nature are also highlighted.
This plenary seeks to provide an overview of global taxonomy development while also assessing the objectives behind taxonomy development and how taxonomies can be used.
Day 2 - 2021
Strengthening North-South Dialogue for Co-operation and Action on Business and Human Rights
Collaboration as a Lever of Change
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This session seeks to examine the gaps in existing relationships between businesses and their suppliers, especially in terms of due diligence practices, supply chain transparency and disclosures. Additionally, it discusses how principles of ‘shared responsibility’ and ‘multi-stakeholder regional collaboration’ can be reinforced to make supply chains more resilient to crises and disruptions.
The aim of the session is to examine collaborative leadership and how it can work as a lever of change. Learnings from case studies of changemakers that have applied collaborative approaches towards addressing challenges are also discussed while highlighting the potential for collaboration for changemaking with respect to climate action.
Family Friendly Policies (FFPs): A pathway for responsible value chain and acceleration towards SDGs
Roundtable Discussion on a Sustainability Framework to nudge FPOs and Markets closer
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This session seeks to understand the scope, experiences, financial benefits, competitive advantage and challenges of businesses together with the role of stakeholders in integrating FFPs in the value chain, during the Covid pandemic.
This session aims at developing an understanding of the emerging market opportunities for FPOs and exploring how such a framework would help FPOs have better access to markets. Feedback and inputs for the proposed framework from a wider network are also sought.
Day 3 - 2021
Opportunities & Challenges for Businesses to drive Nature positive Recovery and Conserve Biodiversity
Sustainability Education in B-Schools
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This session shares learnings from ‘good practices’ on sustainable agriculture across commodities that have worked and possibilities for scaling out and replication. It also discusses and underlines opportunities for businesses to collaborate with other key stakeholders to contribute towards biodiversity and nature as well as highlight policy and institutional gaps at the national and sub-national level.
This session maps the expectations of business sustainability leaders from the B-Schools and discusses how B-school leaders are responding to sustainability education in their respective domains.
Strategy to implement the Circular Economy vision for the IT & Electronics sector in India
BRIDGING THE GAP - SDGs, Informal Work & Priority action agenda
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This session outlines the “Policy Paper on circular economy in the Electronics and Electrical sector”, published by MeitY. It also discusses the transition pathways and concrete action plan for operationalizing the policy paper.
This session is a part of the Women in Value Chains Working Group and explores the existing good practices and experiences of engaging with workers in the informal sector. It seeks to develop an action agenda that delivers on the SDG commitments while focusing on the informal sector.