{"id":29512,"date":"2011-09-06T16:21:53","date_gmt":"2011-09-06T16:21:53","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-05-14T18:41:46","modified_gmt":"2020-05-14T18:41:46","slug":"4512-time-for-sustainable-development-goals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/en\/business\/4512-time-for-sustainable-development-goals\/","title":{"rendered":"Time for Sustainable Development Goals?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><i><span>Guest post by Alex Evans, <\/span><\/i><span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.globaldashboard.org\/\"><span>Global Dashboard<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>From Millennium Develoment Goals to&hellip; Sustainable Development Goals? That&rsquo;s one of the ideas swirling around in discussions ahead of the Rio 2012 sustainable development summit next year, anyway.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>You can see the attraction. With less than a year to go, there are precious few concrete ideas on the table for what the summit might produce, especially in the area of &ldquo;institutional framework for sustainable development&rdquo;, one of two key themes for the event (sure, there&rsquo;s much talk of a new World Environment Organisation, but colour me <em>very<\/em><i>&nbsp;<\/i>unconvinced of the case for that). So might SDGs help to fill the gap?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Well, that would depend on what they cover. The government of Colombia has set out a&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.eclac.org\/rio20\/noticias\/paginas\/6\/43906\/2011-613-Rio+20-Note_by_the_secretariat_Colombia_note.pdf\">proposal<\/a>&nbsp;for SDGs that would cover various sectors &ndash; atmosphere, climate resilience, land degradation, sustainable agriculture, biotech, waste and so forth. This would mainly be about &ldquo;reaffirming&rdquo; (that awful word &ndash; who, other than diplomats, ever &ldquo;reaffirms&rdquo; anything?) commitments made at Rio 1992. But you have to wonder: important though delivery of existing commitments undoubtedly is, is &ldquo;reaffirmation&rdquo; of stuff agreed 20 years ago really going to set any pulses racing outside the sustainable development priesthood?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><em>Much<\/em><i>&nbsp;<\/i><span>more interesting, on the other hand, is the idea that SDGs could provide an institutional foundation for the nine&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.stockholmresilience.org\/research\/researchnews\/tippingtowardstheunknown\/thenineplanetaryboundaries.4.1fe8f33123572b59ab80007039.html\">planetary boundaries<\/a>&nbsp;identified &ndash; and quantified &ndash; by the Stockholm Resilience Centre (see also&nbsp;this&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.globaldashboard.org\/2011\/08\/03\/the-one-book-you-must-read-over-the-summer\/\">previous GD post<\/a>). The core idea in the boundaries approach is to define a &ldquo;safe operating space for humanity&rdquo; &ndash; and, of course, the global economy. So if you&rsquo;re looking for a serious synthesis of environment and economic development, this is ground zero.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Of course, a host of questions would still need to be answered. One would be about what timeline the SDGs would span: 25 years, like the MDGs&rsquo; 1990 to 2015 timescale, or much longer than that?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>There&rsquo;s also the small question of which countries would be covered, and how. The MDGs were basically about developing countries (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.undp.org\/mdg\/goal8.shtml\">Goal 8<\/a>&nbsp;notwithstanding) &ndash; an approach that clearly wouldn&rsquo;t be possible with SDGs, given the huge sustainability impact of consumptions levels in rich countries. So would the SDGs apply globally, but not to specific countries &ndash; leaving them open to the charge that they&rsquo;re rhetorical aspirations, not serious engines of change? Or would they apply to individual states &ndash; opening up the issue of&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/assets.wwf.org.uk\/downloads\/wwf_oxfam_scarcityfairsharesdev2011.pdf\">how to differentiate<\/a>&nbsp;countries&rsquo; commitments?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Then, of course, we&rsquo;d need to know how the SDGs would relate to the MDGs. Some (greens, especially) would like to see SDGs&nbsp;<em>replace<\/em><i>&nbsp;<\/i>MDGs beyond 2015. But lots of developing countries would be&nbsp;<em>deeply<\/em><i>&nbsp;<\/i>suspicious of any perceived dilution of focus on poverty reduction, or anything that looked like it might &ldquo;pull the ladder up after developed countries&rdquo; by denying them space to develop &ndash; and large and influential aid donors might well agree.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>And we&rsquo;d need to figure out an institutional home for the goals, too. It would be crucial for them&nbsp;<em>not<\/em><i>&nbsp;<\/i>to be &ldquo;owned&rdquo; by the environment priesthood &ndash; if SDGs became seen as UNEP&rsquo;s baby, they&rsquo;d be stillborn at birth. Instead, it might be interesting to set up a new, independent, scientifically based international institution to monitor planetary boundaries &ndash; kind of like a global Congressional Budget Office for planetary boundaries. (Normally, I&rsquo;m adamantly opposed to creating new international institutions, given how many we have already &ndash; but here, I think there&rsquo;s a compelling case.)<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Finally, there&rsquo;s the question of process. It&rsquo;s almost certainly too late to define any set of SDGs in time for Rio. Instead, the best option now would be for Rio to provide a launch pad for a process to define a set of SDGs &ndash; perhaps leaving open, for now, how they might relate to post-2015 MDGs further down the line. This would create valuable time for some serious outreach, above all to developing countries &ndash; though not&nbsp;<em>too <\/em>much time, given that you&rsquo;d want to have the SDGs finalised before the United States slides back into presidential election mode from 2015 onwards. Twelve to18 months would probably be about right &ndash; with the Goals signed off at a United Nations summit in, say, spring 2014.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span><i>Alex Evans runs the resource scarcity and climate change programme at New York University&rsquo;s Center on International Cooperation, and is an editor of GlobalDashboard.org.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><font color=\"#666666\"><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><\/font><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; Guest post by Alex Evans, Global Dashboard From Millennium Develoment Goals to&hellip; Sustainable Development Goals? That&rsquo;s one of the ideas swirling around in discussions ahead of the Rio 2012 sustainable development summit next year, anyway. You can see the attraction. With less than a year to go, there are precious few concrete ideas on [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[758],"tags":[],"hashtags":[],"country":[],"class_list":["post-29512","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v26.0 (Yoast SEO v26.0) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Time for Sustainable Development Goals? | Dialogue Earth<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"&nbsp; Guest post by Alex Evans, Global Dashboard From Millennium Develoment Goals to&hellip; Sustainable Development Goals? 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