Chapter 14: Sustainable Development Goals & more

1972 - UN Conf. on the Human Environment in Stockholm

1992 - the Rio Earth Summit

2012 - Rio+20 Summit

the single most urgent task in all of the interconnected challenges of SD is the tasks that the world did take on in the year 2000 with the adoption of the MDGs: the fight against extreme poverty. Extreme poverty is the most urgent priority because it is a matter of life and death for at least 1 billion people.
SDSN is the idea that the world needs not only new goals, political motivation, and will, but also a new era of intensive problem-solving in SD challenges that include health, education, agriculture, cities, energy systems, conservation of biological diversity, and more. The SDSN is a network of universities around the world...

A New Take on the Sustainable Development Goals - Johan Rockström

The evidence from the MDGs is powerful and encouraging. In Sep. 2000, the UNGA adopted the MDGs... Did they make a difference? The answer seems to be yes. There has been a marked acceleration of poverty reduction, disease control, and increased access to schooling and infrastructure in the poorest countries of the world... How did they do this? Why do goals matter? There are many answers to this question:

goals are critical for social mobilization: the world needs to be oriented in a direction to fight poverty / to help achieve SD.
peer pressure in and out
mobilizing epistemic / knowledge communities: with networking for practical pathways.
mobilizing stakeholders

What have been the accomplishments and weaknesses of the MDGs? Probably the biggest accomplishments have been in the area of public health. Three out of the eight MDGs are about health.
SD agenda is even bigger and harder than MDGs. SDGs have included not only the continuation of the fight against extreme poverty but also the integration of that goal with several others, including social inclusion and environmental sustainability.
There are two specific tools that will be important for translating SDGs into reality.

backcasting: Rather than forecasting or guessing what will happen in 2040, we set the target for a certain date and analyze the problems from the target to the present - backward in time - to chart a course between today and the future. How can we get from here to there?
technology road-mapping: It asks deep questions about the pathway from today to the future goal. What are the technological barriers to overcome between now and 2030? (p.493)

The final point that will be absolutely crucial is that the SDGs will be a multistakeholder process.

Economists teach us a lot about where the right boundaries are. There are a few crucial reasons why the private sector approach, which would ideally be the universal one if it actually solved problems, does not solve many critical problems in particular and important cases. The first case is when the challenge is fighting extreme poverty. Markets are basically designed to ignore the poor...
aid can work and that it is vital in certain circumstances. It is especially vital when people are very poor and facing life-or-death challenges... The desperately poor are not consumers who will create an immediate profit... And so the poor need help through other means.

Four major dimensions of SD. There are the traditional three - economic development, social inclusion, and environmental sustainability. But those three requirements in all cases the underpinning of a fourth dimension: good governance.
Good governance: accountability, transparency, and participation through public discourse, public deliberations, and hearings on regulations.

There is an underpinning of ethics in all these ideas. When we talk about moving to global SDGs, were are also talking about the need for and possibility of shared goal ethics. It is heartening that many of the world's religious leaders have come together and declared that the world's religions share a common ethical underpinning that could underpin a shared commitment like SDGs, including the Golden Rule; the commitment to "first, do no harm;" and the standards of good governance, including human rights, accountability, transparency, and participation.