Global Goals Week is annual week of action, awareness, and accountability for the Sustainable Development Goals which this year falls between the 15th and 24th of September. As signatories of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals Publishers Compact, Edward Elgar Publishing has made a commitment to accelerate progress to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030 and Global Goals Week is the perfect opportunity to give an update on how we have been working towards this.
Helping to inform, develop and inspire action towards to the goals through our thoughtful commissioning is one of the key ways we can most usefully support the Compact. As well as curating our content that relates to individual Sustainable Development Goals through our SDG Collection and new Essentials in the UN Sustainable Development Goals collection to ensure it is as discoverable as possible, we are also very excited to be developing two new book series with the first books in each due to be published this autumn.
The Progressing the Sustainable Development Goals series offers a multidisciplinary forum for monographs on the latest research on critical topics and issues related to the SDGs. Interlinkages between the Sustainable Development Goals edited by Ranjula Bail Swain and Yongyi Min will be hot off the press in November. Exploring the relationship between the 17 SDGs, it provides an in-depth analysis of the interconnections between the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of sustainable development and the five pillars of the SDGs: peace, people, planet, prosperity, and partnerships.
The Elgar Companion to Corporate Social Responsibility and the Sustainable Development Goals edited by Samuel O. Idowu and Liangrong Zu is the first book in our Elgar Companions to the SDGs series and will be hitting the shelves, physical and virtual, in October, followed in December by The Elgar Companion to Intellectual Property and the Sustainable Development Goals edited by Bita Amani, Caroline B. Ncube and Matthew Rimmer. These comprehensive Research Companions are the first in an extensive forthcoming collection of original reference books across the social sciences, business and management and law edited by the leading scholars working on the SDGs in these areas. Each book acts as a call to action, feature cutting-edge research and written with a global readership in mind.
In addition to working in partnership with our authors to develop our SDG related content, we have also been looking at how to integrate the goals within our business. Our staff Environment Committee addresses our impact on the environment through activities such as identifying and reducing our carbon emissions. This includes working closely with our suppliers and developing new print strategies, as well as moving to zero CO2 electricity tariffs in our UK offices and installing fan cooled server cabinets rather than using air conditioning. As signatories of Publishing Declares and members of the IPG’s Sustainability Action Group we actively collaborate with others in the industry on this urgent issue.
We also set up a new Diversity, Equity and Inclusion staff Committee in 2022 to identify practical action we can take to encourage progress on issues to reduce inequalities and develop partnerships in areas such as recruitment, accessibility, commissioning, equity and company culture, as well as engaging with industry-wide DEI initiatives.
Written by Katy Crossan, Publisher for Geography, Planning, Tourism and Transport.
September 15, 2023
Academic publishing