Advisors might want to get up to speed on a new set of goals driving the socially responsible investment movement.

Adopted in 2015 by 193 member states of the U.N., the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set 17 goals for a livable planet. The goals include ending hunger and poverty; ensuring access to education, health care and justice; making cities more sustainable; gender equality; reducing inequality and protecting the environment.

Even if advisors don’t incorporate social screens in their investment process, the companies they own in portfolios will be impacted by the goals.

“In 20 years, I’ve never seen a sustainable development program catalyzed in the market like [the SDGs] have been,” said Will Kennedy, officer in charge and senior program officer of the UN Office for Partnerships.

“All the major companies are now figuring out how to line up corporate strategies against this agenda--that’s unprecedented,” Kennedy said during a panel discussion Friday at the annual SRI investing conference in San Diego.

“The SDGs are universal norms,” said John Streur, chief executive at Calvert Research and Management. “It’s the framework we hope to get people behind.”

Still relatively new, the standards have taken over “faster than anything we’ve ever seen” in the SRI space among both public companies and asset managers, said Steve Schueth, president of First Affirmative Financial and conference organizer, in an interview.

The U.N.’s goals are simple outcomes and easy for investors to understand, unlike the dry and academic environmental, social and governance factors, observers said at the conference.

By focusing on outcomes, the SDGs avoid the eye-glazing discussion of a screening process or scoring system, Schueth noted, so you can then identify companies working toward achievement” of the standards.

“Then you have a qualitatively different conversation with the client,” he said.

A separate effort spearheaded by former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg will put companies under the gun to report on sustainability issues.

The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), formed in 2011, is set to finalize sustainability accounting standards next year. The standards will encourage public firms to incorporate in annual reports issues regarding the environment, human capital, social capital, governance and business models that could have a material impact on financials or operations.

Despite the promising developments, SRI proponents have no illusions about how quickly they can force more responsibility on the markets. Public companies and asset managers have come around grudgingly to SRI principles.

“CEOs of these leading [investment] firms for the most part don’t understand why people want to invest for any reason other than making money,” Schueth said.

Sustainable reporting and shareholder resolutions are on the rise, but they’re not effective, said Katie Schmitz Eulitt, director of stakeholder engagement at the SASB.

While reporting companies all believe the disclosures are effective, just 29 percent of institutional investors have confidence in the reports, she said.

“Public companies really don’t want to disclose anything,” Streur added. Managements are already dealing with disclosure “fatigue” and “they’re not looking for more to do.”

The data standards and metrics for judging SRI compliance are too complex, said Anna Snider, managing director and head of due diligence for the chief investment office of Merrill Lynch.

“The markets are really confused,” Snider said. Are SRI consultants measuring behavior, sustainability, or is it downside mitigation or an opportunity on the upside? “Capital markets are totally confused about what all of this is and how to use it.”

But the interest among investors for socially screened portfolios is growing, Schueth said.

And there have been some wins. In the energy sector, “the transition to renewables has been catalyzed by investors,” he said.