On May 9, 2023, Joint Resolution No. 2/2023, issued by the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development and the National Attorney General’s Office (hereinafter “SIGEN”) was published in the National Official Gazette, approving the Second Stage Results Report of the Monitoring and Sustainability Index – ISSos.
The SIGEN, as the regulatory, supervisory and coordinating body of the internal control system, and the Ministry of Environment, are implementing an index to measure, monitor and optimize the status of sustainability practices in the National Public Sector. This is the National Public Sector Sustainability and Monitoring Index -ISSos-, which is a tool for diagnosing, evaluating and monitoring the sustainability of all the organizations that make up the National Public Sector (“SPN” for its acronym in Spanish), whose purpose is to generate accurate and traceable information regarding the status and improvement actions of the main consumption indicators, incorporating criteria of accessibility, mobility, sustainable procurement, etc.
The ISSos has a rating scale from 1 to 5, which allows to recognize whether the entity is in the “Incipient sustainability stage”, identified with red color (values between 1 and 1.99); “Developing sustainability stage”, identified with yellow color (values between 2 and 3.99); or “Growing and integrating sustainability stage”, identified with green color (values between 4 and 5). This valuation allows to know the gap to reach the optimal state, considered between values 4 and 5 “of sustainability in growth and integration”.
The implementation of the ISSos involves four (4) stages:
- Survey and establishment of the Baseline;
- Identification of Commitments and Improvements;
- Follow-up and Monitoring;
- New measurement and feedback.
Resolution No. 2/2023 is related to the second of these, which focused on enabling the organizations to identify improvement commitments to optimize the results of the sustainability axes that, in the first stage, obtained low values (score 0 and 0.5). For this purpose, the Internal Audit Units, together with the key actors of the Organizations, had to select at least two (2) questions for each axis, and for each of them, propose at least one improvement action.
As conclusions of the report, at this stage, more than 5,000 improvement actions were formulated, distributed in 11 axis. The axis with the highest number of committed actions were: energy management, sustainable public procurement and sustainable mobility.
Finally, it was defined that the third stage will be carried out during the current fiscal year 2023, and its objective will be to follow up and monitor compliance with the improvement actions proposed in 2022.
