Just two months ago, the United Nations General Assembly approved 17 new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs follow the success of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which, a decade ago, harmonized, energized, and expanded the world’s first collaborative efforts to help its most vulnerable populations. Now, the SDGs offer companies more ways to “do right, while doing well,” by looking at business through a sustainable development lens.

But what does this entail?

At Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev), we asked ourselves how we could build on our long-standing responsible drinking awareness programs to more effectively and sustainably reduce the harmful use of alcohol, an issue that matters to both AB InBev and the global health community. Our work with the Together for Safer Roads coalition and its Expert Panel helped spark our examination of these programs. We then turned a broader sustainable development lens on our business by seeking guidance from public health experts and our Global Advisory Council.

Through this process, we learned new ways to strengthen our support for the SDGs and other global targets by moving well beyond awareness raising. Our new goals embrace evidence-based approaches to changing individual behaviors and social norms about drinking and they offer consumers a broader array of no- and lower alcohol beer products as well as comprehensive health information about them.

AB InBev recently committed more than $1 billion USD over the next ten years to achieve our Global Smart Drinking Goals, which will contribute to global targets, such as the World Health Organization’s goal to cut harmful use of alcohol by at least 10% by 2025, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s call for private sector action to reduce harmful drinking, and SDG 3, ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being for everyone.

SDG Goal 3 is particularly important, as it includes a target focused on strengthening the prevention and treatment of substance abuse, including harmful alcohol use, and another that aims to halve global deaths and injuries from road traffic crashes by 2020. Our work to reducing harmful alcohol use, including binge drinking, underage drinking and drunk driving, is meant to contribute to meeting these targets.

Looking at business through a sustainable development lens takes the private sector far beyond “business as usual,” and our world needs that now more than ever.

Aligning our company’s goals to those of the UN and its agencies helps ensure our efforts are not just “one-offs,” but that they instead make a meaningful, sustainable contribution to individual lives and society at large.

Our first Global Smart Drinking Goal aims to reduce the harmful use of alcohol by at least 10% in six pilot cities by 2020, with expansion to all of our markets by the end of 2025. Multi-year pilots will launch in Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, China, Mexico and the United States. In each city, we will work with governments and civil society and seek guidance from public health experts to change social norms and behaviors, test new technologies and innovations, and support general practitioners in screening to prevent harmful alcohol use.

Our second goal is to influence social norms and individual behaviors across all of our markets worldwide by investing at least $1 billion USD in dedicated social marketing campaigns and related programs.

Our third goal aims to place a Health Guidance Label on all of our beer products in all of our markets by 2020 and to increase alcohol health literacy by 2025. The label will be developed by an independent group of technical experts and may include alcohol content, product facts and other information designed to increase alcohol health literacy and positively shift consumption patterns.

Our final goal is to expand our offerings of no- and lower-alcohol beer products to at least 20% of our global beer volume by 2025, which will be paired with an increase in marketing and education about these products.

We understand the importance of independent implementation as well as monitoring and evaluation of this work, and will support transparent, credible and arms-length processes throughout. We will also publicly report on progress on our website.

Effective corporate response today requires that companies align with global goals, seeks the counsel of technical experts, and build programs that are far more transparent and collaborative than ever before. Looking at business through a sustainable development lens takes the private sector far beyond “business as usual,” and our world needs that now more than ever.

Image: Angela Rodriguez (right), and Dipak Regmi (second from right), of the United Nations Police (UNPOL) serving with the United Nations Integrated Mission in Timor-Lest (UNMIT), lecture school children on traffic and road safety.