Why the SDGs are a bad idea
The UN’s sustainable development goals are laudable but their complexity means they have been doomed from the start
IF I TOLD you that I had made 17 new year’s resolutions – everything from doing more work and exercise to spending more time with my family – you’d probably suspect that I was being over-ambitious. If I went on to explain that I’d broken my goals down into 169 targets, you might conclude that I was both excessively fastidious and doomed to failure.
Yet those are precisely the number of targets that the world set itself in 2015, when 193 countries at the UN General Assembly agreed on the sustainable development goals (SDGs) to improve the planet and the quality of human life on it. Although they gave themselves 15 years, they were also setting themselves up for a fall.
Sure enough, as we edge past the halfway mark towards 2030, you may not be surprised to learn that planet Earth is off course on its resolutions.
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