A sustentabilidade em instituições bancárias: uma análise a partir dos objetivos de desenvolvimento sustentável.

Abstract

Sustainability is a set of actions seeking to balance social, economic development, and environmental protection. The goal of this paper is to identify how institutions in the Brazilian banking sector use the United Nations Organization's Sustainable Development Goals -SDGs -as the basis for sustainable practices. Companies from different sectors increasingly seek to strengthen the socio-environmental actions developed, emphasizing the importance of companies in the banking sector, which, by offering credit to other companies, promote the expansion of sustainable bias. These credits are used for clean energy projects or even the acquisition of new technologies to innovate their businesses. With the elaboration of the SDGs, the banking sector started to usethem as a metric for the actions developed, as they portray goals and indicators focused on the main dimensions of sustainability, the social, environmental and economic. From the bibliographic review on the subject, categories of analysis were defined, which are: corporate sustainability, communication with stakeholders, sustainability versus marketing, the relationship with the SDGs and the structure of the sustainability report. It is a descriptive research, with a qualitative approach, which occurred through the reading of the Sustainability Reports of 4 Brazilian institutions in the banking sector, from 2015 to 2019. The analyzed companies show that they are up-to-date on the use of the SDGs, with concern for the social, environmental and economic dimensions being notorious. The reports analyzed are based on the Global Reporting Initiative -GRI guidelines, but determine sustainability strategies as a criterion for choosing the SDGs compatible with their actions, which demonstrates the variety of possibilities with which the SDGs can be worked within organizations. As for the dimensions mentioned, they work in an almost similar way. In the social dimension, actions aimed at a quality education, health, safety and well-being prevail, while in the environmental dimension is the use of clean energy, reduction of paper, water and electricity in the branches, and finally, in the economic dimension, financing for the acquisition of new technologies.