The Sustainable Development Goals: A Global Agenda to Sustainable Energy?
Sprache des Vortragstitels:
Englisch
Original Tagungtitel:
Vortrag ? Keynote Speaker - bei der 2nd International Conference of Chemical, Energy and Environmental Engineering ICCEEE 2019, 16.-18. Juli 2019 an der Egypt Japan University of Science and Technology New Borg El Arab in Alexandria
Sprache des Tagungstitel:
Englisch
Original Kurzfassung:
The Sustainable Development Goals:
A Global Agenda to Sustainable Energy?
At the turn of the millennium all representatives of the UN member states signed the Millennium Development Goals. They were a sign of commitment that all states put an effort to reduce world poverty by half by 2015, among other objectives. Environmental issues and aspects of sustainability were only mentioned in one of the eight goals: in MDG 7. In 2015, all countries of the UN General Assembly adopted the new Development Agenda titled »Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development«. The post 2015 development process formulated the Sustainable Development Goals, a set of seventeen aspirational global goals with 169 targets.
As the name of this international agenda already indicates: sustainability gained a lot more attention than it had in the Millennium Development Goals. Another difference between these and the Sustainable Development Goals, besides the strengthening of environmental issues, is that the latter are ment to create a global partnership, where all UN member states will be rated according to their performance of achieving the targets. Whereas the Millennium Development Goals were aimed to the so-called developing regions of the world, now the industrialized parts of the globe are also addressed.
The Sustainable Development Goals can be seen as a strong rhetoric agenda of the international community, but at the end of the day: we all know that paper is patient. The environment is not. The difficulty is the implementation of the goals. And this is eventually a question of political will. States are the main political players in the process of implementation. So far the Sustainable Development Goals are at the level of political rhetoric extraordinary and ambitious; time will tell, if they will be implemented with far-reaching results on a worldwide scale. Only then, they also can be labelled as sustainable solutions for global problems.