Living in refuse, India. Photo source: ©© Lecercle
Excerpts;
Development can no longer focus exclusively on improving people’s lives. Countries must now link poverty eradication to protection of the atmosphere, oceans and land, said a group of international scientists in a comment piece published today in the journal Nature. They propose six Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that do just that.
The UN has committed to developing a set of SDGs to build upon the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which come to an end in 2015. But the UN’s first meeting on defining the SDGs has just ended in New York, with countries still undecided on the way forward.
“It is not enough simply to extend MDGs, as some are suggesting, because humans are transforming the planet in ways that could undermine development gains,” write the 10 scientists in their article, Policy: Sustainable development goals for people and planet. The group is led by David Griggs, the director of the Monash Sustainability Institute in Australia and the former head of the scientific assessment unit of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Co-author Johan Rockström, director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, said in a statement, “Mounting research shows we are now at the point that the stable functioning of Earth systems is a prerequisite for a thriving global society and future development…”
Scientists Propose a New Architecture for Sustainable Development, The New York Times
As a United Nations working group negotiates a set of “sustainable development goals,” 10 scientists and development analysts, in a commentary published today in Nature journal, have proposed a fundamentally different way to frame this concept..
