The Headlines
UCL’s SDG Reactor wants to change British sustainable development
A new collaboration between UCL and the UN Global Compact UK is exploring new ways to bring together stakeholders and advance sustainable development.
By Julie Hoeflinger
"What we're trying to do is build a reactor that helps to form some of those connections."
"The idea is to not only meet the current needs of organisations but also to anticipate the future skills that are going to be needed."
In Brief
- UCL’s New SDG Reactor unites academia, business, and policy with the UN Global Compact UK to drive sustainable development. This collaboration ensures rigorous academic research is effectively merged with real-world business action.
- This massive cross-sector network, connecting research institutions and nearly 1,000 businesses, aims to mainstream sustainability across all organisational operations.
- The Reactor provides a replicable model for UK higher education, showing how universities can reengineer organisations and build momentum to ensure sustainable ideas stick.
In October, University College London (UCL) launched the UK SDG Reactor, an innovation network that seeks to drive sustainable development. The model brings together academia, business, and policy in a way that is uniquely effective at turning sustainability research into practical action.
Among the SDGS are quality education, climate action and no poverty. UCL already leads the way in reaching these goals – the university was ranked first in the UK and third globally out of 1,744 universities in the 2026 QS Sustainability Rankings. And with the launch of this new network, the university has found a way to expand their impact even further.
The Reactor connects two major communities: the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) UK Hub, which is hosted at UCL, and the UN Global Compact UK. The two organisations both focus on advancing the SDGs, but the SDSN works more so with research institutions while the UN Global Compact focusses on the business side of the equation.
The SDSN has worked with the UN Global Compact before, but only in one off collaborations. “We kind of recognised we were both trying to do the same thing but through different audiences,” explains Lily Venables, Senior Project Manager of Governance and SDGs at the UN Global Compact Network UK. “So, by pulling our collective knowledge and efforts together as well as our audiences, we were hoping that we could have a wider impact.”
“We wanted to see what we could do by bringing together the research and academic capability of our network, which is quite a large number of leading universities, with the real heft of the UN Global Compact network, which has almost 1,000 members,” shares Sam Balch, Director of Grand Challenges at UCL. “In a nutshell, the network aims to bring the rigor of academic research into business action.”
The network will spread across multiple different sectors via spaces of knowledge exchange, such as roundtables and webinars. “We're trying to create opportunities for shared learning across sectors because a lot of the evidence suggests you can't solve these sorts of problems through acting in one particular sector alone,” Balch explains. “Effective responses require cross-sectoral action, whether that's government, universities, business, or civil society, so what we're trying to do is build a reactor that helps to form some of those connections.”
Around the same time the Reactor launched, the UN Global Compact Network UK released a report titled, Trailblazers & Transformers: UK Business Sectors Redefining Sustainability. This report provided a sector-by-section analysis on SDG progress in the UK and serves as an early example of their efforts to marry research with business action. The goal was to identify common issues across all sectors where the network might be able to provide targeted support and guidance. Of note, the report found uneven success in achieving these goals and identified “trailblazers” and “transformers:” leaders in the SDGs along with those who could use some reform in their strategies.
Another one of the major goals for the Reactor is to reengineer organisations so that sustainability is fundamentally implemented into all operations. “Before this, you tended to find that many businesses have built sustainability teams with chief sustainability officers, who are kind of board level representatives on sustainability,” Balch explains. “But increasingly the challenge is more about how you mainstream sustainability throughout the organisation because otherwise the engagement with it often ends up being skin deep.”
In terms of first steps for the network, this is still a live area being discussed. The Trailblazers & Transformers report identifies some common challenges across sectors, particularly the measurement and reporting of indirect emissions as well as how to act of them. “Everything we do is grounded in need and demand rather than just assuming that it's important,” Venables says.
Ideally, this model can eventually be scaled across the UK higher education sector. UCL’s approach may have components that are replicable, such as what they do in governance, reporting, research, cross-disciplinary work, and even student engagement. “I think there's an opportunity for us to learn from those that are doing well and share that learning a bit more broadly to make everyone more effective. What are the preconditions for success? By understanding that better, you can effectively provide the recipe for others to do these things better, as well,” Balch expressed.
The idea is to not only meet the current needs of organisations but also to anticipate the future skills that are going to be needed. So, in a post-2030 world after the SGD deadline has passed, it won’t be a conversation of what needs improving but rather how.
“[I think it’s more a question of] how do you build momentum, and that in itself is the thing that leads to change rather than ideas. We've got plenty of ideas, so that’s not necessarily the problem, it's a problem of actually getting the ideas to stick,” Balch says, adding that we don’t necessarily need to radically change all the SDG’s once we hit 2030.
“I think in 20 years’ time, I would hope that we have more of a symbiotic relationship between different sectors,” Balch shares. In an ideal scenario, businesses are thinking about how they can leverage research within their local areas or through these wider networks, and knowledge institutions are funding research based on the evolving needs of businesses, and so on.
The UK has become a global leader in sustainable development, and universities are critical to this leadership both now and moving forward. The SDG Reactor is sure to elevate UCL’s role, and that of UK higher education at large, in paving the way toward a greener, fairer future.
“This initiative showcases how universities can drive real change through cross-sector collaboration,” shares Alysha Alva, Communications Executive for Project Everyone, a nonprofit communications agency that works closely with the UN to promote the SDGs. “It stands as a model for how higher education can catalyse systemic transformation towards a more sustainable world.”
If you have any further questions regarding the UK SDG Reactor, please reach out to Lily ([email protected]) or Sam ([email protected]).