SDG alignment

We believe strategies that support human health must go hand-in-hand with actions that improve education, reduce inequality, catalyze economic growth, confront climate change and protect our environment.

The WELL Health-Safety Rating recognizes these connections by offering a balanced, integrated framework of strategies that, while supporting the health of individuals within buildings, also seek to enable the wider community and surrounding environment to flourish. The rating, which consists of a subset of relevant features from the WELL Building Standard (WELL) adapted for facility operations and management, was informed by the COVID-19 pandemic, but has broader applicability for supporting the long-term health and safety needs of people in a given space.

Because we recognize that human health is inextricably linked to both the health of our planet and the inclusiveness of socioeconomic institutions that support everyday life, we’ve identified the evidence-based ways in which WELL can support commitments to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). By mapping each WELL feature to the Target level of the SDGs - which offer metrics-based benchmarks that correlate more closely with specific feature strategies - we sought to highlight the multi-faceted, evidence-based impact of WELL in a global context while identifying opportunities to evolve WELL into an even more comprehensive framework. The results of our mapping exercise, visually tagging every WELL feature to identify which Goal(s) it supports, make it easy for projects to select WELL features that help advance their SDG ambitions.