HOW RELX ADVANCES THE UNITED NATIONS’ SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS
By Laura Peek
A passion project
As people gathered across the world to protest the killing of 46-year-old George Floyd by a police officer in Minnesota last year, two attorneys at LexisNexis, part of RELX, were determined to find a way to advance social justice.
“We are in an employee group called the African Ancestry Network,” says Rhea Ramsey, who has worked at LexisNexis for 21 years and is regional manager for the Midwest. “After George Floyd’s death we talked about what we could do to make a difference.
LexisNexis has amazing legal resources but they were spread across different parts of the company. We sat down to figure out how we could bring all this information together to help attorneys, policy makers and activists working on social justice.”
Ramsey and her colleague Delaine Frazier, who is a legal research attorney in New Orleans, Louisiana, created a one-stop-shop for essential legal and regulatory information about racial equality and police reform. The platform provides all existing and proposed civil rights statutes — such as the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act; practical guidance kits, including one to help protestors understand their rights; and in-depth reports about police violence, hate crimes and protestor arrests from the company’s legal news service Law360.
It also includes a Racial Equality and Police Reform Tracker, which was created by LexisNexis StateNet. This clickable map enables users to view police reform legislation by state — including pending laws and amendments to existing laws. For instance, clicking on Illinois brings up the proposed Bad Apples in Law Enforcement Accountability Act and a recent change to the Law Enforcement Officer-Worn Body Camera Act. “You can compare states to see the direction laws are going in and the trends occurring within police reform,” says Frazier.
“For instance, I can click on Louisiana and Texas to identify what each state is doing on police reform.”
Despite working from home due to Covid, and with Frazier also looking after twins, the pair took on the challenge in their spare time. “It was such a pivotal moment and, because of my limited ability to go out and protest or engage in activism, this was a way I felt I could contribute,” says Frazier.
“We wanted to do something tangible and we worked night and day to get it done,” adds Ramsey. “It was a passion project and it took a village — we reached out across the organization and so many people helped and encouraged us. It was the fastest project I’ve ever worked on but it was wonderful.”
Ramsey and Frazier now hope to expand the Equal Justice platform to South Africa, the UK, France and Canada.
The project is one of the ways RELX contributes to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The 17 SDGs were introduced by the United Nations in 2015 as a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and reduce inequality. The aim is to achieve them by 2030.
The Equal Justice platform supports SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities) and SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions). It is emblematic of the company’s practical, action-orientated and grassroots-led approach to advancing the SDGs.
Unique contributions
RELX, the global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools, began work on the SDGs since their adoption by the United Nations in 2015, and uses them as a catalyst for corporate responsibility. It views its commitment to the goals as an integral part of its strategy rather than a bolt-on activity. “Our publicly-stated goals are aligned to the SDGs,” says Dr Márcia Balisciano, global head of corporate responsibility. “Every company has to do its part beyond business as usual.”
This means applying its considerable legal, scientific and medical resources — what it terms its “Unique Contributions” — to advance the SDGs. For instance, LexisNexis Risk Solutions, RELX’s Risk business, in 2020 contributed to SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions) by distributing over 1.7m alerts in 2,100 missing children cases through the ADAM program on behalf of the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. It also helped advance SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities) through financial inclusion projects that helped people in Mexico and Colombia gain access to credit by providing alternative data sets not in traditional credit reports — such as home ownership, education status and professional licenses.
LexisNexis Legal & Professional works to advance SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions). It provided legal resources to the Democratic Republic of Congo, launched a free tool to make disability claims in the UK easier and more likely to succeed and made its news coverage and practical guidance freely available to help people navigate legal issues around Covid-19. It also continued its partnership with the International Bar Association on the eyeWitness to Atrocities app, which enables people to record human rights abuses in a secure and verifiable way so the information can be used as court evidence.
RX, the exhibitions business of RELX, helped advance SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities and Communities) by transforming an exhibition venue in Vienna, Austria, into a Covid field hospital with a 3,111 bed capacity. Meanwhile, the Functional Fabric Fair, a US trade show taking place in Portland, Oregon, in October stipulated that exhibitors use recyclable materials and low-energy lighting in their booths to reduce the impact of the event and support SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production). The business also runs a portfolio of future energy business events specifically designed to support the global sustainability agenda. Among them is the World Future Energy Summit which in 2020 was attended by 34,000 attendees from 125 countries.
Elsevier, which is the world’s leading provider of scientific and medical information, and part of RELX, advanced SDG 3 (Good Health) with its Novel Coronavirus Information Center that provides free information for the global research community. The company also created partnerships and initiatives aimed at tackling disparities in healthcare, including sponsoring a medical day in Niger aimed at improving the treatment and prevention of meningitis, malaria and malnutrition and providing scholarship funds for nursing schools at historically black colleges in the US.
The Elsevier Foundation contributes over $1.2m a year to research programs dedicated to the SDGs, with particular emphasis on SDG 3 (Good Health), SDG 5 (Gender Equality), SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities) and SDG 13 (Climate Action).
With only nine years to achieve the SDGs, the world is looking to the global research community for answers. Elsevier mapped the state of research within each of the goals in its report The Power of Data to Advance the SDGs. There were over 4m articles relating to specific SDGs published between 2015 and 2019.
Working with SDG experts, Elsevier’s data scientists used its abstract and citation database Scopus and its research performance assessment tool SciVal to assess progress and identify shortcomings in SDG research. It shared its methodology and datasets on Mendeley Data. The company also created a free layer on SciVal enabling anyone to access the research. Times Higher Education (THE) is using Elsevier’s SDG mapping as part of its 2021 Impact Rankings, which assess universities against the SDGs.
The report found the most researched SDGs were those with strong relevance for industrialized countries. There was far less research activity relating to SDGs that directly seek to help the poorest. The SDG with the most publications was SDG 3 (Good Health) with over 3m articles followed by SDG 7 (Clean Energy) with 383,000 articles and SDG 13 (Climate Action) with 180,000 articles. SDG 1 (End Poverty) had only 11,000 articles. The report found most of the research was produced in high income countries.
Elsevier has been working to reduce the research gap between developing and industrialized countries in support of SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities). It was a founding member of Research4Life, which provides free and low-cost access to scientific research and helps researchers publish through measures such as waiving article publishing charges. Elsevier provides a quarter of the material available in Research4Life, including around 3,000 journals and 20,000 e-books as well as access to Elsevier’s Scopus, Embase, Mendeley and ClinicalKey solutions.
Dr Marcia Balisciano is the global head of corporate responsibility at RELX and Chair of the United Nations Global Compact UK Network. RELX is a LEAD company of the UN Global Compact, one of about 40 companies among more than 10,000 corporate signatories.
Gender equality in research
The Power of Data to Advance the SDGs found most SDG research does not sufficiently factor in sex and gender. It noted that, while some SDGs might not have an obvious link to or need for sex or gender analysis, there is growing recognition this must be considered to ensure policies benefit men and women equally.
The report found over 60 per cent of articles relating to SDG 5 (Gender Equality) and SDG 3 (Good Health) factored in sex and/or gender. However, fewer than 40 per cent of articles relating to the other SDGs incorporated these factors. “The vast majority of SDG research areas have very little sex and gender integration,” says Ylann Schemm, director of the Elsevier Foundation. “This is a major stumbling block for implementing these SDGs. For instance, climate action only has a 4 per cent mention of sex and gender, despite women being disproportionately affected by climate change.”
Analyzing sex and gender factors in SDG research, The Power of Data to Advance the SDGs
Failing to consider biological sex in health research can have significant consequences. For instance, women in Britain are 50 per cent likelier to be misdiagnosed following a heart attack because heart failure trials generally use male participants. “Historically, doctors and researchers were trained to recognize a heart attack through what have become known as traditionally male symptoms, “ says Schemm. “Acute chest pain rather than the diffused flu-like symptoms women tend to experience.” Elsevier has been working to address these shortcomings in research. It uses the SAGER Guidelines to ensure studies factor in biological sex and trains researchers to think about sex differences at the research design stage.
In its 2020 report The Researcher Journey Through a Gender Lens, the company found that — while the participation of women in research is increasing overall — inequality remains in terms of outputs, citations, grants and collaborations. For instance, women author fewer publications than men in every country and, among first authors, the average citation impact of men is greater than that of women. The report notes some people attribute these inequalities to the attitudes and ambition levels of women and others to gender bias.
At the same time as the report was launched, Elsevier founded an external Inclusion & Diversity Advisory Board with distinguished experts to guide the proactive role that Elsevier can play in redressing the balance of SDG 5 (Gender Equality) in the research community. Its spread of female conference speakers went from 15 per cent in 2015 to 40 per cent in 2021. Meanwhile, over 600 journals now display the gender of their editors on dashboards on the journal homepages — The Lancet, for example, has a 50:50 gender ratio on its board.
A jungle court
RELX encourages individual as well as collective action on the SDGs and one employee has gone to considerable lengths to advance SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions) helping to set up a tented court room in a jungle in Borneo — despite her initial misgivings.
“When the Chief Justice of Malaysia asked me to join the mobile court I thought he was joking,” says Gaythri Raman, managing director of LexisNexis Southeast Asia. “All the other events I had been to were in five-star resorts. I bought the biggest tent I could find — it had two bedrooms and a sitting room.” This turned out to be a mistake: after eight hours in a four-wheel drive and four hours on a river boat, Raman staggered up the mosquito-infested river bank at dusk, snapped on her head lamp and unfolded the instructions. “My huge tent was the hardest to put up,” she says. “It was exhausting.” She finally emerged — wearing pajamas and in search of a meal — and was directed to a generator-lit tent where she discovered she was expected to give a speech to local dignitaries. “Are you kidding?” she says. “I was threatening my team with all sorts of things if they took pictures.”
The next morning villagers, who had travelled from miles around, lined up in makeshift law offices. Indigenous people in the Malaysian state of Sabah are often stateless because they are unable to register the births of their children due to the remoteness of the villages. This means children cannot register for formal education. One 16-year-old girl called Rosnah told Raman she had travelled for 12 hours to obtain the birth certificate that would enable her to sit exams. “When I was that age I would have done anything to get out of an exam so I felt humbled,” says Raman. “I also felt shame about my privilege.”
An estimated 10m people around the world are undocumented leaving them unprotected by the law often because they live in remote locations. Mobile courts tackle this issue one village at a time. Raman and her colleagues have not been able to join the mobile court in Borneo since the start of the pandemic but they plan to be back next year.
A long-term strategy
RELX has gone further than most companies in integrating the SDGs into its business and is always looking for new ways to contribute. It operates an SDG Resource Centre — which contains articles, tools, data and news — and runs an annual SDG Inspiration Day. The company signed the Climate Pledge, a commitment to achieve net zero by 2040 at the latest. RELX became net zero on its own emissions plus business travel in 2020.
“Advancing the SDGs is a critical component of the long-term success of our business,” says Dr Balisciano, who has led corporate responsibility at RELX for over 15 years. “We see no trade-off between being profitable and being responsible. We build good relations with customers, investors, current and future employees, governments, NGOs and the communities in which we live and work.”
The company’s approach has been recognized by the ratings agencies that rank companies based on their environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance: RELX was ranked in the top one per cent of over 13,000 companies by Sustainalytics and has maintained a AAA MSCI ESG rating since 2016. It also came fourth in the Responsibility 100 Index — a ranking of the FTSE 100 on performance against the UN SDGs — and was on the World Benchmarking Alliance’s SDG 2000 list.
Investors are increasingly using ESG data — alongside traditional financial analysis — to support investment decisions. People want to invest in companies taking proactive and meaningful steps on climate change and social justice.
Youngsuk Chi, head of RELX corporate affairs, is conscious this can lead to corporate virtue-signaling. From reducing carbon emissions and setting new inclusion standards to developing accessible products and maintaining an ethical supply chain, he has ensured the company focuses on practical actions rather than rhetorical commitments.
“In the area of clean water and sanitation, which is SDG 6, we were no better than anybody else,” says Chi. “Now there is no way we’re going to sign a lease with a landlord who does not abide by a very high standard for water usage.” The company has installed waterless urinals in its New York building as well as sinks with stoppers and automatic taps that flow for six seconds rather than the usual 15. “Small things matter,” adds Chi. “We measure how much water we use and report it to our employees saying: “Well done! We’ve reduced water usage by 12 per cent. Let’s go for 12 more.”
The company also uses ethically sourced paper. It wants to go further and phase out paper altogether but is discovering sustainability can be complex. “We may be reducing paper but using more electricity so we also have to make sure the electricity is produced in an efficient way,” says Chi, adding: “I bought a Tesla and thought I was contributing to the world but I never asked where the electricity comes from when I’m charging it — we are all learning.”
Critics of the SDGs say the goals are too broad and ambitious — particularly since the pandemic has significantly set back progress. SDG 1, for instance, aims to end poverty by 2030 yet around 120m people were pushed into extreme poverty by Covid-19 — the first rise in global poverty for 20 years. Despite the enormity of the task, RELX is redoubling its efforts. “It’s hard and it’s meant to be hard,” says Chi. “We just have to make progress. I have a positive mental attitude — I believe in doing the right thing whether or not we hit the target.”
