Sustainable development is how we must live today if we want a better tomorrow, by meeting present needs without compromising the chances of future generations to meet their needs. The survival of our societies and our shared planet depends on a more sustainable world.
It’s a bit of a juggling act. Three different balls must be kept in the air at once: economic growth, social inclusion, and environmental protection. If one or two fall to the ground, the act is over. An economy might grow rapidly, for instance – but only for so long if most people remain poor and all the natural resources are used up.
Where development is sustainable, everyone has access to decent work, quality health care and education. Natural resource use avoids pollution and permanent losses to the environment. Public policy choices ensure that no one is left behind due to disadvantages or discrimination.
Making the Right Choices Now
If you want to understand why sustainable development is so important in real-world terms, just look around. On average globally, people live longer lives with higher incomes. But a lot of development is unsustainable. It has taken us to climate change. Environmental destruction. Conflict. Poverty and hunger. Vast inequalities and social instability.
Unsustainable development happens when people pursue immediate rewards without thinking about harms to other people or the planet. Often, short-term gains are overshadowed by longer-term costs. That’s the case when someone cuts down an entire forest to turn a quick profit – even if an ecosystem collapses, endangered species die off and local communities are left at permanent risk of devastating floods.
A blueprint for our common future
In 2015, UN Member States translated their vision of sustainable development into a blueprint for achieving it: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Its 17 Sustainable Development Goals —with ambitious targets to achieve by 2030— cover the three dimensions of sustainable development: the economy, social development and the environment.
However, halfway to our 2030 deadline, the climate crisis, a weak global economy, conflicts and the lingering impact of COVID-19 have put the Goals in jeopardy.
According to the UN SDGs Report 2023: Special Edition, the number of people living in extreme poverty in 2020 rose to 724 million, and now gender equality is some 300 years away. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that without more robust policies across all sectors, the world is likely to surpass the critical 1.5°C tipping point by 2035.
It is not too late to reset efforts to reach them, however. To advance the sustainable development agenda, governments are integrating the Goals into national plans. However, a fundamental shift is needed to put the world on a better path. And with seven years left to achieve the 2030 Agenda, it is needed now.
The SDG Summit, to be held at UN headquarters on 18-19 September 2023, will be a defining moment for world leaders to renew their commitments and deliver the breakthroughs that our world desperately needs. The Summit will be an opportunity to review progress and gaps in achieving the Goals and will seek to provide high-level political guidance on transformative, accelerated actions to reach the Goals by their 2030 endpoint.
Anyone can act
It is not only up to our world leaders. Every person can benefit from a more prosperous, inclusive and resilient world. We can all do something about it, regardless of whether we are in a government or civil society, run a business or a home, are in school or out of it.
While governments set policies to steer sustainable development, and both the public and private sectors have to finance the major shifts it requires, individual decisions add up fast. Your choices to earn a living, move around, make friends or advocate for justice can all make an impact. Want to know more? Find out how you can act now for our common future. Embrace the possible.
Also:
Roadmap towards a sustainable future?
Comprehensive and sustainable use of our natural resources is one of the major challenges for the future. The United Nations is therefore currently developing an agenda with 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a roadmap to 2030. One of these goals is sustainable use of marine resources. However, it is individual countries’ commitment that will determine whether the world comes close to achieving this ideal.
Social justice – a key goal
Living conditions around the world still vary considerably. Many people live in extreme poverty, suffer hunger and have no access to education or social progress. Recognizing the major problems affecting social development in many parts of the world, the United Nations adopted the Millennium Declaration in September 2000 as the basis for the establishment of eight major development goals. Known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), their purpose was to help achieve significant improvements in social conditions in the developing countries by 2015. Several of the MDGs have been reached; many have been partially met. MDG 4, for example, aims to reduce child mortality by two-thirds by 2015 compared with 1990, when annual mortality among the under-fives stood at 12.7 million. Since then, the figure has fallen to six million despite a growing world population. The United Nations sees this as a landmark victory in its campaign to further reduce child mortality.
Despite these glimmers of hope, there has been frequent criticism of the MDGs in recent years. Viewed in terms of the classic three-pillar model of sustainability, the MDGs’ unilateral focus on social aspects is identified as an obvious shortcoming. The environmental dimension features only once, namely in MDG 7, and there is no mention of marine resources at all. The critics also point out that the MDGs fail, by and large, to address governance aspects and that they apply only to the developing countries.
A universal global sustainable development agenda?
At an MDG summit in 2010, it was therefore agreed that a new agenda should be defined for the period beyond 2015 to 2030. The future goals should be universal: in other words, they should apply to developing, emerging and developed countries alike and should take account of all the dimensions of sustainability. Crucially, it was recognized in this context that living conditions cannot be improved if the environmental dimension is neglected and humankind’s natural life support systems continue to be destroyed. The new post-2015 agenda should therefore also take account of the outcomes of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) held in Rio de Janeiro in 2012, exactly 20 years after the UN Conference on Environment and Development (Earth Summit) took place in the same city. The Rio+20 outcome document deals with the social dimension, such as poverty eradication, but also calls for a green economy, as well as measures to combat environmental problems, e.g. land degradation, desertification and climate change. In order to elaborate the new post-2015 sustainable development agenda, an Open Working Group (OWG) was established in 2012 under the auspices of the United Nations; this format was chosen in order to involve a range of stakeholders in the deliberations.
Open to suggestions
In contrast to many other processes conducted under the auspices of the United Nations, the Open Working Group – as the name suggests – was intended to be inclusive and accessible to a broad public. An Internet portal was established, enabling interest groups, businesses and individ-uals to submit position papers and wellreasoned proposals on new goals. The scientific community and other experts were invited to share their experience on various aspects of sustainability and feed it into the process.
As a rule, every UN member state has the right to send a representative to the various United Nations committees and bodies. To ensure that every representative from almost 200 countries has a chance to have a say, the time available for individual statements is reduced to a minimum. In order to ensure that the work on the SDGs progressed in a constructive, efficient and focused manner, it was therefore agreed that in the OWG, the inputs would be streamlined, with one representative speaking on behalf of a constituency of three countries, such as the Germany/France/Switzerland trio. The constituencies’ spokespersons – generally diplomats or senior officials from the member states’ Foreign or Environment Ministries – rotated on a regular basis. The duration of the Open Working Group’s sessions was also reduced substantially, as the aim was to submit a comprehensive proposal on the new sustainable development agenda in the shortest possible time. In order to access the knowledge of the scientific community and other civil society groups, the OWG invited experts to New York to provide brief inputs and statements on various aspects of sustainability. The aim was to consult independent scientists who were able to provide an overview of current research in their particular discipline. Directly involving external experts from civil society was an unusual move for the United Nations: generally, it is only the member countries’ own designated representatives who appear before UN bodies, doing so once they have been duly briefed by policy advisors or external experts.
This consultation process involving experts and national representatives lasted eight months and also focused on the marine environment. In spring 2014, the OWG finally published its report. In it, the OWG proposes 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets to be reached by 2030. This makes the list of SDGs far more detailed than the old MDG agenda with its eight Millennium Development Goals and 21 targets. As the first step, the United Nations General Assembly approved the Open Working Group’s proposal in autumn 2014. In the following months, a United Nations committee held further negotiations in order to develop the SDGs in more detail and resolve the issue of financing.
Also:
Do you know all 17 SDGs?
The UN's 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a global framework for sustainable development, aiming to address critical challenges by 2030. These goals, adopted by the UN in 2015, focus on areas like poverty, hunger, health, education, gender equality, clean water, energy, economic growth, industry, inequality, cities, consumption patterns, climate action, oceans, land, peace, and justice
1 No poverty
2 Zero hunger
3 Good health and well-being
4 Quality Education
5 Gender equality
6 Clean water and sanitation
7 Affordable and clean energy
8 Decent work and economic growth
9 Industry, innovation and infrastructure
10 Reduced inequalities
11 Sustainable cities and economies
12 Responsible consumption and production
13 Climate action
14 Life below water
15 Life on land
16 Peace, justice and strong institutions
17 Partnership for the goals
History
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015, provides a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future. At its heart are the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are an urgent call for action by all countries - developed and developing - in a global partnership. They recognize that ending poverty and other deprivations must go hand-in-hand with strategies that improve health and education, reduce inequality, and spur economic growth – all while tackling climate change and working to preserve our oceans and forests.
The SDGs build on decades of work by countries and the UN, including the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs
In June 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, more than 178 countries adopted Agenda 21, a comprehensive plan of action to build a global partnership for sustainable development to improve human lives and protect the environment.
Member States unanimously adopted the Millennium Declaration at the Millennium Summit in September 2000 at UN Headquarters in New York. The Summit led to the elaboration of eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to reduce extreme poverty by 2015.
The Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development and the Plan of Implementation, adopted at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in South Africa in 2002, reaffirmed the global community's commitments to poverty eradication and the environment, and built on Agenda 21 and the Millennium Declaration by including more emphasis on multilateral partnerships.
At the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in June 2012, Member States adopted the outcome document "The Future We Want" in which they decided, inter alia, to launch a process to develop a set of SDGs to build upon the MDGs and to establish the UN High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development. The Rio +20 outcome also contained other measures for implementing sustainable development, including mandates for future programmes of work in development financing, small island developing states and more.
In 2013, the General Assembly set up a 30-member Open Working Group to develop a proposal on the SDGs.
In January 2015, the General Assembly began the negotiation process on the post-2015 development agenda. The process culminated in the subsequent adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, with 17 SDGs at its core, at the UN Sustainable Development Summit in September 2015.
2015 was a landmark year for multilateralism and international policy shaping, with the adoption of several major agreements:
Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (March 2015)
Addis Ababa Action Agenda on Financing for Development (July 2015)
Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development with its 17 SDGs was adopted at the UN Sustainable Development Summit in New York in September 2015.
Paris Agreement on Climate Change (December 2015)
Now, the annual High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development serves as the central UN platform for the follow-up and review of the SDGs.
Today, the Division for Sustainable Development Goals (DSDG) in the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) provides substantive support and capacity-building for the SDGs and their related thematic issues, including water, energy, climate, oceans, urbanization, transport, science and technology, the Global Sustainable Development Report (GSDR), partnerships and Small Island Developing States. DSDG plays a key role in the evaluation of UN systemwide implementation of the 2030 Agenda and on advocacy and outreach activities relating to the SDGs. In order to make the 2030 Agenda a reality, broad ownership of the SDGs must translate into a strong commitment by all stakeholders to implement the global goals. DSDG aims to help facilitate this engagement.