Sustainable Development Goals. The boost for a green future
“This agreement marks an important milestone in putting our world on an inclusive and sustainable course. If we all work together, we have a chance of meeting citizens’ aspirations for peace, prosperity, and wellbeing, and to preserve our planet" - Helen Clark.
Advertisement
After Rio, the world was worked into a sustainable development frenzy, and undertook several initiatives under Agenda 21 – The Agenda for the 21st Century. Then came the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which committed the international community to an extended vision of poverty reduction and pro-poor growth, one that strongly places human development at the centre of social and economic progress in all countries.
Whereas some countries achieved a measure of success under the MDGs, others did not do so well that their performance was described as “off track”.
Set of goals
On September 25, 2015, under the auspices of the UN, the countries in the world adopted a set of goals as part of a new sustainable development agenda for 2030. Each goal has specific targets to be achieved over the next 15 years. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development includes a set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets to end poverty, fight inequality and injustice, and tackle climate change by 2030. Globally, massive progress has been made on the MDGs, showing the value of a unifying agenda underpinned by goals and targets. Nonetheless, the indignity of poverty has not been ended for all. The new Global Goals, and the broader sustainability agenda, go much further than the MDGs, addressing the underlying causes of poverty and the universal need for development that works for all people. The SDGs are graphically presented below.
Source: UN
Fighting extreme poverty
While the MDGs focused on ending extreme poverty, hunger, and avoidable disease, and were the most important global development goals in the United Nations’ history, the SDGs will continue to fight extreme poverty, but will also add the challenges of ensuring more equitable development and environmental sustainability; particularly the main goal of decreasing the dangers of human-induced climate change. The SDGs offer major improvements on the MDGs.
The SDG framework addresses major systemic barriers to sustainable development such as unsustainable consumption patterns, inequality, weak institutional capacity, and environmental degradation that the MDGs neglected. The UN Agency at the forefront of the SDGs is the UNDP, which has offices in virtually all countries of the world. UNDP also played a leading role in the MDGs.
In Ghana, the SDGs were launched by President John Mahama on Friday, February 12, 2016. The launch could not have come at a better time. Why? This is the time that the country is witnessing serious water shortages, and public outcry about a national burden – galamsey – which simply means ‘gather them and sell’. For a long time, we Ghanaians forgot that water is life. However, we seem to have been jolted from our slumber due to the severe water shortage that three regions have been grappling with, and may even spread further.
Galamsey menace
Galamsey is threatening our very existence due to its adverse impacts on human life, the ecosystem and our water bodies.
There is a value chain in the galamsey business – those who offer the land, those who occupy lands they have no title deed, the operators, the financiers including foreigners (viz. Chinese), the big men, the buyers of gold and some of the service providers including those in short skirts. How many John Owusus do we need to lose to take a decisive action? We owe it as a duty to hand over the environment to the future generation in a reasonably good state. We may not care, but those who come after us, I am sure do. This is the time to fix the canker or leave our fate to a few greedy and selfish individuals.
The pervasiveness of the SDGs mean that everyone has a role to play to ensure its success. While Ghana did moderately well in the attainment of some of the MDGs, we should aim to score gargantuan points in 2030, when the ultimate stock is taken on the SDGs. This country belongs to all of us, and we need to preserve it, and not let it to become a wasteland.
Writer’s e-mail: [email protected]
