Sustainable Development Goals

World leaders are meeting in New York to discuss the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the successor to the Millennium Development Goals. But what are they and why do they matter? A blog by Owen Gaffney, Director of International Media and Strategy at the Stockholm Resilience Centre for www.roadtoparis.info lists out key facts about the SDGs.

The idea came from the Rio+20 Summit in 2012 – the largest summit in UN history. Colombia and Guatemala proposed goals to follow on from the Millennium Development Goals, set up in 2000 to halve poverty by 2015. Poverty, as measured by living on less than $1.25 a day, has halved. Setting goals works – in a complex world, organisations and countries can align their agendas and prioritize funding.

The new goals are the result of a three-year process involving 83 national surveys engaging over 7 million people, making it the biggest consultation in UN history. Nations finally agreed on a list of 17 goals. Some critics argue that 17 are too many. The goals will not be legally binding, part of a new trend in international policy to prevent endless legal obstructions. The 35-page United Nations text outlining the post-2015 development agenda is available. “This agenda is a plan of action for people, planet and prosperity,” it says.

The concern now is how to make people care about the SDGs. If no one notices them, they won’t attract the attention they need to build momentum. This is a very real issue because the media has largely ignored them to date. British film-maker Richard Curtis aims to bring the goals to 7 billion people. Part one of the plan has been to work with the Swedish designer Jakob Trollbäckto rebrand them as the Global Goals and create an army of #goalkeepers. While the Millennium Development Goals were aimed at poorer countries (more or less), the new goals are designed to be universal.

This is a monumental shift in thinking about sustainable development from a worldview where rich nations support poorer nations to develop, towards a view where the actions of all, particularly those in wealthy nations, risk destabilizing important parts of Earth’s life-support system – most obviously the climate, the oceans, biodiversity and the forests. So which country is most likely to complete the goals first? Sweden, according to one report. Norway, Denmark, Finland and Switzerland are close behind.