We're going to look now at the sustainable development goals and how they relate to the field of sustainability and development. Thinking about the background to the SDGs and also their scope for achieving the goals. The learning objectives for the introduction to sustainability and development MOOC are as follows. We want to know about what the SDGs are and which ones have a clear link to sustainability. Secondly, we're interested in learning about the sustainable development goal targets and indicators, and what the potential is for those types of targets and indicators to be used for tracking progress and for helping us move towards our broader objectives. I'll provide information about the history of the SDGs and specifically how it transitioned from a small number of goals at the millennium, called the Millennium Development Goals, to the broader set of goals that the SDGs represent. We'll talk about which SDGs are likely to succeed and which ones will fail. I'll go over a few reasons as to why we may see some lagging in the success of some of the SDGs, particularly those related to the topic of sustainability. Lastly, we'll think in depth about the potential for and limitations for the SDG framework to support and facilitate critical thinking in the field of sustainability for development. What are the sustainable development goals? The SDGs are basically a blueprint for policymakers and practitioners working in the field of sustainable development to have a set of objectives to orient their actions around and a set of objectives to work towards. They are really focused on highlighting critical global challenges, including challenges focused on poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace and justice. In many ways, they cover several of the topics that are very close to the study of sustainability and development, but in other ways they fall short. There are 17 sustainable development goals that had been orienting the global community since 2016. The time frame for achievement of the sustainable development goals is this period of 15 years between 2016 and 2030. The goals are broad and as I've already mentioned, cover a very wide range of topics including poverty, hunger, access to education, a focus on reduction of inequalities and thinking about global institutions. Some of these goals are quite specifically focused on issues that are very tightly coupled or closely tied to the topic of sustainability and development. For example, achieving zero hunger requires significant investment in agricultural systems, which has implications for sustainability and development. We also consider a sustainable development goal number six, clean water and sanitation, goal number seven, affordable and clean energy, and goals 13, 14 and 15, climate action, life below water, and life on land to be very closely tied to sustainability objectives. Several of the other goals have highly very strong linkages to the topic of sustainability and development, but don't have an explicitly environmental component in their title. The background to the Sustainable Development Goals is an interesting story. The SDGs emerged out of several years of global negotiations with policymakers, practitioners, representatives from NGOs, representatives from indigenous rights groups, and other key stakeholders trying to provide input to what would become the global agenda and the orienting set of ideas for development policy and practice. The sustainable development goals as an idea were born at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 2012. The broad objective there was to produce a universal set of goals that could really address urgent environmental, political, and economic challenges that the world was facing at the time and continues to face. The SDGs replace an earlier set of goals and a more narrowly defined set of goals known as the Millennium Development Goals, which were started as a global effort in year 2000, primarily oriented around the issue of solving poverty or reducing poverty. The MDGs, although really one of the first orienting sets of goals on global scale, did not encompass environmental issues to the extent that we have realized it's necessary for them to be covered. Interestingly, the sustainable development goals coincide with the signing of two other very important global agreements. One is an agreement that was signed in 2015 related to climate action at the COP, the 21st COP in Paris. The second is the disaster risk reduction, or the Sendai Framework, which was signed in Japan in the same year in 2015. From the perspective of the field and sustainability and development, the culmination of these three agreements coming together at the same time in 2015, really set the stage for an unprecedented opportunity for the global community to rally around issues related to climate emissions, mitigating and managing the risks of climate change and natural disasters and thinking about how we could build resilient societies and rebuild societies after crises. In order to understand the sustainable development goals, it's important to have a little bit of the historical context. The Millennium Development Goals, as I've already mentioned, were formulated and presented to the world in the year 2000, at the turn of the century, they really oriented international development policy and practice for a period of roughly 15 years until they were replaced with the Sustainable Development Goals. As I've already mentioned, the focus of the MDGs was very squarely on poverty. There were eight specific Millennium Development Goals, and you can see them listed here, focused on eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education. With education known to be a critical component of developing human capital and growing economies. There was a focus on gender equality and empowering women, reducing child mortality and improving maternal health, combating HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases that have tremendous burden on global populations. Ensuring environmental sustainability and developing global partnerships for development. As I'll talk about in just a few minutes, unique or interesting feature of the MDGs that make them different from the SDGs is that the Millennium Development Goals were really focused on low and middle-income country settings and were not goals that applied broadly to the entire world, including high-income countries. The Millennium Development Goals, which oriented much of the policy and practice taking place in low and middle income countries between the period of 2000 and 2015 were very successful in many ways. We saw more than a billion people lifted out of extreme poverty. We saw a significant reductions in child mortality or infant mortality and we saw a significant reductions in the number of children being out of school or dropping out. We also saw HIV and AIDS infections fall by almost 40 percent, which was a remarkable achievement taking into account the role or the impact of HIV/AIDS on populations, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. The sustainable development goals are interesting and unique in that there are very specific targets and indicators associated with each of the 17 goals. Among the 17 goals, there's a list of 169 sustainable development goal targets and each of these targets are backed by a unique set of indicators. For your reference the full list of SDG targets and indicators is found at the link below. This is an example of a sustainable development goal, target and indicator associated with SDG number seven, affordable and clean energy. The target 7.1 is specified that by 2030, we should ensure universal access to affordable, reliable, and modern energy services. So this is the statement about what the objective is that we're trying to achieve. The indicator is a specific and frequently quantitative way of measuring progress over a period of time so that we can see whether improvements have been made and what the scale of those improvements are. So the indicators that are married to target 7.1 are Indicators 7.11 and 7.12. These are respectively the proportion of the population with access to electricity and the proportion of the population with primary reliance on clean fuels and technology. If national governments are able to collect data and to provide information on these indicators. It allows us to track progress and to state very clearly whether the goal has been a success or fallen short of the target that was set. One of the fundamental challenge for the sustainable development goals is the issue of missing data. The targets that have been laid out and the indicators that accompany them, really will require reliable, regularly collected, and robust data that can provide information on whether goals are being achieved. This graphic illustrates on a goal by gold basis what indicators we have data available for and where we are lacking data. The red color on the slide are indicators for which global monitoring is simply not possible. So we face a challenge in a variety of areas in terms of understanding what our progress is and how we will be able to measure ourselves over the period of the Sustainable Development Goals are orienting our actions. You may be starting to get a sense of how the sustainable goals are different from the Millennium Development Goals. There are several dimensions of the SDGs that set them apart from the MDGs. First, they are broader in scope and really seek to address the root causes of poverty and the universal need for development in a way that works for all people. I would say that they have a broader focus on inequality, which as we have evolved over the last several decades, have come to realize is a major issue both within several countries but also between countries. The SDGs also center efforts around three core dimensions of sustainable development, economic growth, social inclusion, and Environmental Protection. These three core dimensions are agreed upon by the global community and serve as an orienting structure for the broader set of 17 goals. Thirdly, they cover more ground. They address key issues related to inequalities, decent jobs, and employment opportunities. Recognize the emergence of urbanization and cities as really critical components of sustainable development discourse. They allow us to think much more broadly about environmental sustainability by considering issues related to industrialization, oceans, ecosystems, energy, climate change, and sustainable production and consumption. They give serious and measured attention to topics related to peace and justice, and they also provide an orienting set of goals for global frameworks and institutional development so that we are better equipped at a global scale to address sustainability and development. As I've already mentioned, the goals are universal and apply to all countries. This is different than the Millennium Development Goals, which were really focused on low and to some extent middle-income countries settings. The SDGs also focus on Means of Implementation. They have language that draws our attention to critical issues regarding mobilization of financial resources so that the SDGs can be adequately addressed and resolved. They have a focus on capacity building in areas where capacity is limited, on the role of technology in terms of solving sustainable development problems, and a focus on data and institutional development. So in many ways, they take a much more holistic perspective to thinking about not only what the key issues are, but what some strategies for solving them are. Finally, and with very much importance for our Intro MOOC and the topic of sustainability and development, the new goals recognize in a very explicit way, the need for climate action and tackling climate change as essential for achieving sustainable development and poverty alleviation. We're going to hear now from several experts who have been asked to think about the relationship between the sustainable development goals and the field or the topic of sustainability and development. We were very lucky to have a fantastic group international scholars and practitioners with us in Ann Arbor, Michigan in October of 2019 for the second annual sustainability and development conference. We sat down with several folks at that time and asked them this question. Are the 17 sustainable development goals representative of sustainability and development as a field of study? If so, how? If not, why? Here's what they had to say. I think the SDGs do cover a lot of the essentials of sustainability and development. Almost anything can be fit in there, but I think what we're sometimes missing is how they connect between them. Now, there's a lot of people, for example, and some of my work has looked at how gender equality, for example, can contribute with gender equality is SDG five, but it can contribute to zero hunger, and ending poverty, and several of the other SDGs. But sometimes they get treated as silos. I think there's good signs now that people are talking about, well, this can contribute to three or four of the SDGs. So people are seeing the interconnections. To me, the value of the SDGs as kind of guiding set of targets that might be appropriate for organizing our efforts as a field of research, is that they help give us a place to coordinate. They help give us a place to think about where there are linkages between the work we're doing and others and diverse contexts. They give us a framework to place the fields that we are working in narrowly as individuals within a broader context. Now, certainly the SDGs help us do that, but there are also emerging areas of the field that cross over between these different goals. So one of the challenges in using the SDGs as an organizing framework for the field of sustainability research is, many of the kinds of sustainability and development problems that we're concerned about need to be approached by considering many of the SDGs in Tandem. So in the example of National Park governance, we might think of conserving biodiversity as an important goal under the SDGs, but that's going to depend critically on supporting good governance, which is another area of the SDGs. So finding linkages is an important part of developing this field. The 17 sustainable development goes to me representative of sustainability, but in that sense, if you stand by, there's always wish to modify, take something out and may be add something. So I think that goals are aspirational, inspirational and they're good enough, especially if react to implement them, and to me, I think they issue boils down to implementation. As I base right now, I wouldn't say we should take any of the goals out or maybe animal but we should see to fortunate rise as to whether and how we are implementing these goal, because they are very broad and they cover a lot of dramas. So I think they're representative of the field of sustainability and development, I say, but then I think, if you have questions to ask about the goals, those questions revolve around how they are being implemented and how the goals are being achieved, and how people, their awareness about the goals are also something that needs attention. Now, that we're five years into the timeframe that the sustainable development goals apply to you. You may be wondering what we're on track to achieve and where we may be falling short. The expectations are that by 2030, we will be relatively successful at the global level of eliminating preventable deaths among newborn children and children under five, and also in terms of getting children into primary school. Major gains have been made with universal primary education, and it looks very positive that we will have a lot of success for these two objectives. Where we are expected to fall short, are in critical areas related to poverty and areas related to agricultural production and environmental sustainability. The goal of eliminating extreme poverty is not likely to be met, the expectation is that there will still be at least 430 million people living in extreme poverty by 2030. With recent events related to the global crisis of COVID-19, it's just very difficult to say what additional impact this will have on the population living in extreme poverty. We also have good reason to believe that our targets to end hunger, to protect the climate, and to deal with biodiversity loss are completely off-track. Unfortunately, the global community has not rallied in a substantive way around these issues, and so we're faced with a situation where although there has been investment and attention to these core issues, that we are not anywhere near meeting the targets or indicators that are being set in these very important areas. Why are we off track? It's hard to imagine with all of the effort and attention pointed towards the sustainable development goals, that there isn't greater success being achieved. The major reasons include lack of funding. Trillions of dollars are required in investment related to international development, related to supporting economy, related to public sector development, and we're simply not meeting the levels of investment that are required to achieve the ambitious goals set by the SDGs. A second major reason that we're off track is because the goals are not mandatory and reporting progress is optional. There are no consequences at all for countries who fail to meet or fail to report on their progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals. There may be political economy reasons to believe why countries will do their best, make their best effort towards reporting and trying to meet goals, but it remains that they are only optional and not required, and so until we have a mandatory framework or a mandatory set of objectives that the global community is working towards, progress will continue to be slow. Finally, and very important to the study of sustainability and development is that we increasingly recognize that several of the Sustainable Development Goals are actually at odds with one another. How can we have strong growth in GDP without having a negative impact on climate? That is an example of why we're faced with trying to reconcile the trade-offs and synergies that exists between various goals. To further discuss whether and why the SDGs are on track or not quite on track, I'd like to introduce a segment by Michael Green, who's the Chief Executive Officer of the Social Progress Imperative, he considers the question, how can we make the world a better place by 2030 and really takes a critical look at the sustainable development goals, where we're at, how we can track progress and what we should expect by the time we get to 2030. Acknowledging that we will have some successes and we'll fall short when we get to 2030 and think about where we're at with the Sustainable Development Goals, I'd like to now ask you to think about the question of sustainability and development and what knowledge gaps we might have. Once again, I'd like to return to our panel of experts that were at the Sustainability and Development Conference, in Ann Arbor, Michigan in October of 2013. We asked them this question, imagine the field of sustainability and development 10 years from now, in what areas are we lacking actionable knowledge and what can we begin to do now to overcome this? In 10 years from now, if we continue on the trajectory we're going right now, I think we may end up with gaps in our knowledge about the issues of scaling, and really how do you go from things that may work on a pilot basis to things that work more broadly? Because the SDG goals are very ambitious and they require doing things at scale. But the reaction is very often then to do a program that has sort of a cookie cutter stamp, that is done everywhere the same. One of the things we've learned over time is that to be successful, things have to be adapted to local conditions. It's all very well to say that things should be participatory but if people are participating in setting their own objectives and ways of delivering it, then they may not look the same everywhere. So I think one of the gaps we have right now is that, how do you bridge between doing things at scale and doing things in a participatory manner that are locally adapted? So that's one of the big tensions I think. I hope that in 10 years that will have been addressed but right now I think that's a problem. The main struggle that I have when thinking about the SDGs, and I think many other people do as well, is that they are a framework that might organize our actions and our efforts. But they are not a framework for implementation and there's not an overarching theory of change about how we are going to accomplish all of these things. Now, one might say that the SDGs are important because they begin that conversation but where I see the field going in general is to develop theories of change both related to specific goals and related to the group of goals about how you move from the state where we are now into a state where these goals are being achieved. That's why I focus a lot of my own research on implementation, is because I think that that's a critical area of sustainability and development studies where we lack knowledge on, is how do we create pathways to achieving these kinds of things that are realistic on the ground? If I were to project the field 10 years into the future, I would imagine that finding ways to imagine how we move from a state where we're not accomplishing these goals, to a state where we are is the major challenge. I think I'll go back to education. I think education, and that doesn't mean education is already one part of the goals, but I think people need to be aware of their environment and the way we use resource and the implications of that for future generations. One of the things that I always keep talking about is even regardless of the fact that we know about the SDGs, there are also people that's, for example, if you take climate change as a case, people don't believe that climate change is happening. So if you have the population or if you have people, especially policy makers or governmental officials that are supposed to be at the forefront of helping to achieve or driving us towards a sustainable future, if they don't believe in such goals or if they don't see the end and where we are coming from, it becomes very difficult. So I think maybe we need to work harder disabusing the mind of probably politicians, policy makers and the people at the forefront of our battle to make this world or this planet sustainable for the next generations. So with that said, I think the average person also needs to be educated, sustainability is more than, I think it goes way beyond the academic community. So we should find ways to educate the public about how we can live sustainably, and again, that's also broad. But how can we make sure that we leave a very good footprint for the future generations. So again, coming back to the question, I think education is something that is really important, it's one of the key for us to, an area that we should look into very well for us to be able to achieve all the other Sustainable Development Goals. That's what I think. There are several key takeaway points from this final segment of the Introduction to Sustainability and Development. We want you to know and to understand that the Sustainable Development Goals are much more comprehensive than the Millennium Development Goals. They cover a broader range of subjects or focal areas and they encompass all communities and all people on the planet rather than those just in low and middle-income countries. The SDGs provide very clear guidance, specifically through the use of measurable targets and indicators. These targets and indicators give us a very, very, very clear set of objectives to work towards and a way to measure and track progress over time. Without this focus on targets and indicators, we wouldn't know whether or not we were achieving goals. The targets and indicators are a challenge, however, because the data do not always exist for all of the targets and indicators that fall under the rubric of the SDGs. Some are relatively easy to track and have well-established systems and others are really a challenge to track due to lack of data for a wide variety of reasons. We know that we're making progress in some really important areas that the SDGs focus on but we also know that progress on the topic of climate change, on the broad topic of poverty, and on biodiversity conservation, is lagging and that targets will not be met. This is part of the reason that we have chosen to focus our introductory look on sustainability and development on these three key areas for action. We know that part of the reason that targets are not being met is because of critical challenges related to funding support for initiatives that move the Sustainable Development Goals forward, and also because of voluntary rather than mandatory reporting on progress. Finally, we acknowledge and emphasize that many of the SDGs are at odds with one another and that there hasn't been careful consideration given to trade-offs and synergies between the goals. What I'd like you to do now is to think about what the vision and scope for a future set of goals, so the next SDGs that will follow after 2030, what should the vision and scope for those goals be?
