Sustainable development goals — universal language
The UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals are a series of goals, targets and indicators for governments the world over to follow, to promote and encourage a sustainable way of life. Yet these global goals will only be truly effective if they’re also practiced at a local level. I spoke to David Connor, founder of Liverpool’s Impact 2030 Hub, to learn how global goals translate to local initiatives.
“The thing about the Sustainable Development Goals, is that not very many people know they exist,” says David Connor, founder of Liverpool’s Impact 2030 Hub. “It’s almost a little bit like a secret club at the moment, as the UN tries to get them off the ground.”
Launched in 2015 at the UN Sustainable Development Summit in NYC, and formally known as: Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a series of 17 goals, which aim to address global problems, including poverty, healthcare, gender equality and clean energy, to name a few. Acting as a framework for countries to follow, the SDGs contain a series of 169 targets, which have been created out of the Millennium Development Goals — a series of eight goals the UN Member-States agreed to meet at the turn of the century. The Millennium Goals were criticised by many for not going far enough in making changes around themes such as global poverty, universal primary education and combating HIV, and were considered a series of targets for poor countries to achieve; they were subsequently replaced by the SDGs in 2016.
The former UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, in large part informed the creation of the SDGs, and his oft quoted assertion that, “we don’t have a plan B, as there is no planet B,” is a sobering reminder that global collaboration is key to the health of our planet. The SDGs — which were agreed upon by the UN’s 193-Member States — are a global call-to-arms for world leaders to incorporate the goals, targets and indicators into the political policies and agendas of their respective countries, before the official deadline set by the UN, of 2030.
Yet, how common-knowledge are the SDGs? They’re being pushed by the UN as an imperative framework for the future of our planet, but how many people have actually heard of them? Government policy shapes many aspects of our lives, from education to healthcare, to where we live, work, and how much we get paid; but global decisions, made by world-leaders in a fancy office, thousands of miles away isn’t something that most people worry about, or even pay much attention to. That is, until it’s played out on a local level. And that is the very key to the success of the SDGs.
“I was a little sceptical of UN at first, you get images of them in this Ivory Tower in NYC, and I started questioning: ‘what do they really do on a local level?’,” says Connor. After closely following the Millennium Development Goals over several years, Connor welcomed the introduction of the SDGs and set about creating an entrepreneurial hub in the heart of Liverpool, which would abide by and promote the SDGs on a local level.
The Impact 2030 Hub is a physical workspace in Liverpool city centre, home to a vibrant task-focused community of cross-sector collaborators, working together to make the SDGs meaningful in Liverpool. The hub gives people a safe space to talk, focusing on impact rather than the semantics of how things happen. Working with primary and secondary schools in the local area, Connor and the Impact 2030 Hub team want to bring the SDGs into the classroom, to educate future generations. There’s also talk of taking possession of empty homes in the city, which will be fitted with a renewable energy supply, and will house the city’s homeless.
“I thought it was a really interesting concept to knock down the silos and barriers; something that could unite entrepreneurs, the corporate sector, the public sector and the charitable sector to think creatively to fund different forms of social finance,” says Connor. “With the Impact 2030 Hub, we want to blend entrepreneurship with the SDGs.”
Established around two years ago, following the UN’s announcement of the SDGs and discovering that there was an appetite for this type of hub in Liverpool, Connor, along with his brother, set the wheels in motion for its creation.
What followed was a whirlwind of activity, and an act of unity hailing from across the pond in Atlanta, Georgia. “I was contacted by Atlanta-based Sue Stephenson of Impact 2030,” says Connor. “Impact 2030 is a private sector-backed coalition, aligning the business world with the SDGs through human capital and volunteering, and Sue was very interested in what we were doing in Liverpool; she told me that they were looking for a non-capital city to pilot some projects.
“I was invited to the UN headquarters in NYC for the Impact 2030 Summit, and that trip removed all of the preconceptions around what the UN was, for me,” Connor says. “The UN thoroughly understands the complexity of the world’s economic, social and environmental challenges. It’s keen to listen to anyone with solutions, and it asked the question: ‘how can we get Liverpool more involved in the UN?’”
The Impact 2030 Hub is based in the heart of Liverpool — a city which has long been associated with innovation. “We always knew that the SDGs were going to be pushed towards a local context at some point and we tried to design that into the model. We wanted to ask: what are Liverpool’s goals? How can we prioritise them?’”
Finding local solutions to global issues is the bedrock of the Impact 2030 Hub. When faced with the first two SDGs: ‘1: End poverty in all its forms everywhere’, and ‘2: End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition, and promote sustainable agriculture’, many people feel a disconnect. Poverty and hunger isn’t something that happens to them; poverty and hunger is a problem that is addressed by charities searching for solutions for the myriad crises in the third-world; causes that people pledge £5 towards on Red Nose Day. But these are issues that are happening on people’s doorsteps, they just may not have made that connection. In Merseyside alone — the home of the Impact 2030 Hub — there are over 60,000 children living below the breadline; homelessness is on the increase, and the reliance on food banks is rising. For the global goals to be reached by 2030, everyone needs to play their part — from conglomerates to corner shops; private sector companies to people at a local level. Education and increased awareness of the SDGs is imperative for them to succeed.
“We’ve got a big job ahead of us; we know that we need to educate people,” says Connor. “It could take between three and five years to do that, and it’s our mission to get the message out there to the stakeholders, to the social enterprises, the private sector and the charities. We need to educate people in order to create the fertile ecosystem in the real world and online, to accelerate our journey to impact.”
There’s already plenty of initiatives that people can get involved in, they’re just not necessarily framed with an SDG-focus. Take for example, SDG number 14: Life Below Water — ‘Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development.’ Most people are aware of climate change; notably most recently following President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement, an act which sent shockwaves around the world, and brought the problem of climate change to the fore.
But less people are aware that our oceans are dying, with careless overfishing, global warming and marine plastic pollution having destroyed many of our ocean-dwelling species. According to reports, at least eight million tonnes of plastic leak into our oceans each year and by 2050 it is predicted that there will be more plastic than fish in our seas. 71% of our earth is made up of water, so how can we tackle this issue on a local level? Each year, marine conservation charity, Surfers Against Sewage holds its ‘Big Beach Clean’, which invites people to their local beach, to get rid of ocean plastic pollution. This collaborative, community-driven act of picking up plastic bottles, straws, coffee cup lids and any other pieces of plastic from the shoreline, is the perfect example of the SDGs in action. It’s local action such as this, that Liverpool’s Impact 2030 Hub aims to encourage.
“There are only three hubs in the world; one in Burkina Faso, one in Mexico — but each of these only focus on one small aspect of the SDGs,” says Connor. “There’s only one local hub in the entire world, and that’s in Liverpool. We have become the pet project of the UN’s local 2030 initiative — which has seen it create a stronger local presence around the world. This is about countries; it’s a wonderful opportunity to sit down with businesses, talk about being a global citizen even at a local level; the SDGs are becoming more and more of a universal language.
“We can make the SDGs relevant in Liverpool, but we can also connect that at the highest level into the 17 Global Goals. Liverpool is on the global map; it’s a pioneer, and it’s now up to Liverpool to show the UN what we can do with that.”
