#11: Why the Sustainable Development Goals are the UN’s Best Idea Yet…
Welcome (back) to TheClimateProject!
Today, we will be exploring our first article of a political nature: the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Although this topic is not specific to renewable energy and rather focuses on sustainable development as a whole, it does contain some important links to sustainable energy and its importance in the broader spectrum of development. So, without further ado, the article…
The United Nations General Assembly, when they adopted the Sustainable Development Goals…
In 2015, the United Nations stood at a crucial turning point. Why you ask? Because 2015 marked the end of an era. Indeed, less than two decades prior, the United Nations had launched their Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) initiative, aiming to target the world’s largest problems, from eradicating poverty (MDG 1) to combatting HIV/AIDS (MDG 6) to even achieving universal education (MDG 2). Well, all of that came to a close in 2015, and the UN was now tasked with setting their next array of targets, in order to incite the next fifteen years of multilateral collaboration for the benefit of all mankind. Too dramatic? Well, it was a big deal to the UN.
So, what did they come up with? The Sustainable Development Goals. Well, as stated by at-the-time Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon “saving our planet, lifting people out of poverty, advancing economic growth–these are one in the same fight.” Indeed, the UN Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, were quite literally a step into the future for the United Nations. Rather than solely being concerned with driving economic, social, and political development around the world, the UN was now working to ensure that this development was also sustainable, working to reap long-term rewards for their efforts, rather than seeking to profit from immediate developments.
So, how did all of this work? Well, to accommodate with this new mission of sustainability, the MDGs needed to be expanded. While there were only 8 goals set in 2000, the new SDG initiative was now comprised of 17 new objectives, as well as numerous sub-targets, aiming to be both specific and wide-reaching.
Although some of the SDGs are merely recycled with some reformatting and adaptation, others are brand new. Indeed, forward-thinking targets, such as ‘Sustainable Cities and Communities’ (SDG 11), ‘Life on Land’ (SDG 15), or ‘Life Below Water’ (SDG 14), clearly epitomize the United Nations’ increased focus on the sustainability aspect of development, on both an environmental and social scale.
And this new vision is something which has strongly been requested by a number of civil society organizations for years. Thus, the United Nations set off on a path to ensure not only development but also sustainability. After all, what good is unsustainable development anyway?
Well, to understand the SDGs more, we need to take a closer look at their predecessors, the Millenium Development Goals. What were they? Did they succeed? What is their connection to the UN’s SDGs. Let’s dive right into it.
The Millenium Development Goals
Okay, so, before the UN unveiled their new-fangled SDG’s in 2015, they had run a similar campaign just fifteen years prior. These were, of course, the more well-known Millenium Development Goals. And, they were… interesting, to put it delicately.
Why? Well, the UN MDGs were quite broad for one. Many found the entire initiative to be somewhat of a rose-colored vision of the future. I mean, was it even possible to achieve such broad, enormous targets in just over a decade’s time? What path would we even take to get there? What incentives did we have?
Questions like these are what caused the MDG initiative to gain some harsh criticism and backlash. Articles, research papers, and blog posts from academics, civil society, and journalists alike argued the various problems, gaps, and lapses in the entire project. For instance, a 2005 paper by Amir Attaran titled “An Immeasurable Crisis? A Criticism of the Millennium Development Goals and Why They Cannot Be Measured” pointed out the way in which the MDGs were immeasurable, and even if we disregarded their broad targets and infeasibility, we would still have no way of knowing whether they had been achieved.
So, 2015 came along, and surprise, surprise: the goals weren’t achieved. The world hadn’t developed in line with the utopian ideal pushed forwards by the United Nations. So, what next? Well, that where the UN proposed their new initiative: the Sustainable Development Goals.
The Sustainable Development Goals:
While the Millenium Development Goals aimed to motivate countries to achieve development objective, the Sustainable Development Goals aim to push that a step further, by also ensuring that whatever steps are taken to ensure that development takes place, those steps are sustainable and can be maintained over extended periods of time.
Aside from the goals and ideas already presented in the MDGs, the SDG initiative added a whole host of new goals, for example focusing on climate change (SDG 13) or sustainable energy (SDG 7). These goals are put in place to make sure that countries don’t necessarily adopt practices that would only work for one, two, or ten decades. Instead, it wants government leaders to instead opt for policies that will lead to long-term gain, instead of only fixating on the short-run benefits.
This, in essence, is why the SDG initiative is superior to the MDG initiative. While the MDG initiative placed a series of utopian goals within a very small, nearly impossible time frame, the SDG agenda seems to instead advocate for long-term solutions.
When analyzing this, it almost makes it seem that the U.N. realized its mistake in implementing the MDGs in the first place. I mean, seriously? How could we ever expect to resolve global poverty less than two decades? But now, the focus is on implementing practices and policies that can allow for the goals in the SDGs to be met.
It’s all about preparing for a long, grueling journey to develop the third-world, and also to transform first-world development practices into sustainable approaches. That’s why the SDGs are better than the MDGs ever were. Anybody who criticizes the fifteen-year time frame of the SDGs is entirely missing the point.
Will we Attain the SDGs?
That’s a simple question, with a complicated answer. As mentioned above, the point of the SDG initiative is to implement practices that can allow for the world to develop sustainably, in accordance to some broad targets and objectives.
To attain the SDGs, the first step is to ensure that these practices are put into place and that they are maintained over the years to come. Are these policies and methods perfect? Of course not. Will they work? Maybe, maybe not. However, the SDG initiative can be thought of as one big experiment: how can we understand how to get from point A to point B. We’re not actually trying to get there just yet.
So, although we can’t know if the Sustainable Development goals will ever be attained, we can see the value of the United Nations in this situation. They want to start a conversation, a discussion, a plan, about what the planet is going to do about its future. The process of development is long and hard.
And that is why it is of utmost importance to have a clear plan, and a clear platform for intergovernmental collaboration in order for us to ever achieve any of these goals one day.
So, are the SDGs perfect? No. Are they an improvement from their predecessors? Most definitely. And improvement is all we need to keep moving forward.
Thank you for reading! Hope you enjoyed this exploration into the motivations of the United Nations in relation to the SDG initiative, especially in comparison to the MDG initiative that preceded it. People often tend to misunderstand what the U.N. is really trying to do in these kinds of situations, but just taking a little bit of a closer look at their goals can help us understand the actual answer.
Also, this article was quite non-scientific in nature, which I like to do from time to time–it’s best to understand an issue from all angles. But, next week, I’ll have something a lot more engineering-centric, for all of you gearheads out there.
