15 July - 21 July
What I Want to Share This Week:
This was a really helpful map of the SDGs:
I wish there was an easier way to find the most recent reports published by the UN. They can be a bit hard to read which makes me wonder if the majority of people will make the 2030 SDGs happen. But at the same time, they are a really good way of getting an overview of topics really quickly.
Because I like variety, I usually think of development goals as ‘the 10 million world priorities’ (i.e. they’re all in priority order), but the SDGs are a really helpful way to get ideas on what the world voted on in 2015.
I came up with a potentially really useful way of defining and thinking about sustainability. This topic was so hard to define… it had so many different definitions that were frequently conflicting.
Therefore, how about this as a “unified theory of everything” about sustainability:
Sustainability is the 100 prioritized goals that have any kind of connection to environmental things (including percentages that help with food, food running out, resources running out, animals). And development is all the other millions of priorities, including sustainability but wider than sustainability. Would you choose the most important ones, neglected ones, ones of most interest, or a mix of these?
Any of the ten million priorities would benefit from ethical, safe, careful, effective %s…
And because sustainability is so wide, to just pick a few to do something
e.g. tipping points (e.g. around insects & world), energy methods, how climate change affects the world, the complexities of the world food system, the 100 ways to prevent the effects of droughts over the next 100 years, etc.
I have always found the SDGs a bit overwhelming, which is why it’s good to explain them a bit. The idea was first created in 2000 in the form of the Millennium Development Goals, and then the world voted in 2015 for choosing the SDGs. The final SDGs aren’t in a priority order, but were chosen as the most important goals out of all goals in the list that the UN shared with the world
While I think that there are 10 million world priorities/ goals/ problems that need %s of solutions, the Sustainable Development are important because they show you the overall categories the entire world voted on. This means that by reading the goals and the subgoals within them, you can get an idea of the most important world areas. However, you also need to remember that smaller group’s specific needs are not included, even if they’re really important. Therefore, the SDGs are a representative of overall, majority needs.
You can group them together to be able to remember them better. For example:
Human capital: quality education, zero hunger (brain development), good health and well-being, clean water and sanitation
Vulnerable people: reduced inequalities, gender inequality
Income: industry, innovation and infrastructure, affordable and clean energy, no poverty, decent work and economic growth
Environment: climate action, life on land, life below water, sustainable cities & communities, responsible consumption & production
Other: peace, justice and strong institutions, partnerships for the goals
