1. Prologue
I recently googled the three words “past,” “present,” and “future.”
For “past” there were about 11,690,000,000 results, for “present” about 12,210,000,000 results, and for “future” about 9,790,000,000 results. The most hits are for “present,” while the hits for “past” reached 96% of that level and those for “future” reached 80%. As you might expect, “present” is the most important to us, and “past” is the next most important. “future” came in third, but the fact that it reached 80% of “present” is highly significant: The future is worth looking forward to.
I then divided “future” into “bright future” and “dark future” and googled them again.
Bright future: About 649,000,000 results
Dark future: About 1,610,000,000 results
“Dark future” had nearly 2.5 times more searches than “bright future.” Why is this? Does it mean that the future, which is 80% as important to us as the present, does not feel bright, but dark and gloomy?
2. History of SDGs
As we entered the 21st century, the United Nations, the largest and most authoritative international organizations with 193 member nations, developed measures to overcome humanity’s anxiety about a bleak future. As a part of this, leaders from 189 countries gathered at the UN Headquarters in New York in September 2000 to sign the Millennium Declaration, an agreement to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015.
The MDGs consisted of 8 goals and 21 measurable detailed targets. The first of the goals was to end poverty and hunger (1), which mandated halving the absolute poor living at less than $1.25 a day by 2015. The following seven goals were to achieve universal primary education (2), to promote gender equality and empower women (3), to reduce child mortality (4), to improve maternal health (5), to combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases (6), to ensure environmental sustainability (7), and to develop a global partnership for development (8). The MDGs were mainly aimed at the people of developing countries in the bottom third of the world’s 7 billion people with per capita incomes of less than $1,500. The MDGs, announced by then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, continued for 15 years until 2015.
The announcement of the MDGs was an earth-breaking event in the sense that mankind joined forces to fight poverty for the first time in human history. However, in 2015, the target year, 12 of the 17 targets of the MDGs were evaluated as not having been achieved, excluding the 4 detailed targets of developing a global partnership for development (8), which did not have quantitative evaluation criteria. In particular, the employment rate (1.b) fell from 62% to 60%. Sustainable development (7.A) was also found to have regressed from before
.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon decided to present new goals that the UN should continue to pursue over the next 15 years, based on the experience of the MDGs.2 He set out the purpose of creating a set of global goals related to the environmental, political, and economic challenges that people face as humanity. At the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2012, Secretary-General Ban asked UN members to submit new proposals by 2013. At the same time, the UN website received a wide range of proposals from people around the world, under the title “What kind of world do you want?” Secretary-General Entrusted by Secretary-General Ban, Nikhil Seth,3 the current UNITAR Executive Director, sorted out a huge collection of proposals submitted from all over the world.
The 193-member UN General Assembly adopted the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda on September 25, 2015, with a set of 17 of Sustainable Development Goals that included (1) no poverty, (2) zero hunger, (3) good health and well-being, (4) quality education, (5) gender equality, (6) clean water and sanitation, (7) affordable and clean energy, (8) decent work and economic growth, (9) industry, innovation and infrastructure, (10) reduced inequalities, (11) sustainable cities and communities, (12) responsible consumption and production, (13) climate action, (14) life below water, (15) life on land, (16) peace, justice, and strong institutions, and (17) partnerships for the goals. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon hailed the SDGs as a universal, integrated, and transformative vision for a better world.
For the purpose of objectively evaluating performance against the 17 goals and 169 targets, the UN General Assembly adopted the quantifiable global indicator framework on July 6th, 2017. Since then, UN Statistical Commission has annually refined and comprehensively reviewed the indicators. As of June 2022, there are 231 global indicators that UN Statistical Commission will review against actual performances on a global basis.9 This global indicator framework will be complemented by local indicators at the regional and national levels, which will be independently developed by each region and the respective UN Member countries.
Albeit rooted in the MDGs, SDGs differ from MDGs in five ways, as shown in . First, the SDG idea generators are broader. The UN solicited ideas from 193 UN member countries and global citizens at large through the UN website, while the MDGs were produced by a group of experts within the UN. Second, the SDG targets are wider. SDGs include advanced countries as well as the developing countries originally targeted by the MDGs in 2000. Third, the SDG criteria are flexible, allowing each country the freedom to set its own national criteria for achieving the SDGs. Fourth, the scope of the SDGs is more diverse, including economic growth, social inclusion, and the environment, while the MDGs mainly cover social issues. Fifth, as a result of the fourth difference, the SDGs include more goals, targets, and indicators. At the time of its adoption by UN in 2015, the SDGs comprised 17 goals, 169 targets, and 23210 indicators, compared to the 8 goals, 21 targets, and 63 indicators of the MDGs.
There are a couple of specific characteristics of the SDGs. Secretary-General Ban was conscious of justice and accountability in the process of allocating a large funding for humanitarian purposes. The 16th Goal of the SDGs therefore includes these two words in its title “Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable, and inclusive institutions at all levels.” In this way Secretary-General Ban made it clear that the Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) funds for the purpose of achieving the country-specific goals and targets would not pass into the hands of corrupt dictators in developing countries. For the same purpose, the 17th Goal of the SDGs was set to help promote global partnership, as shown in its title, “Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development.” World’s leading scientists and statisticians were invited to take part in the process of developing indicators that are logical and operational.
3. The future of the SDGs in research and education
Understandably, SDGs have been fully recognized and utilized within the UN System and by UN family organizations such as UNITAR, UNESCO, and Global Compact. Outside the UN boundary, however, SDGs have not had as much impact. In the business arena in particular, the SDGs are lagging in popularity behind the recent upsurge of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), measures, which have gained worldwide popularity since 2020 through the leadership of CEO Larry Fink of Blackstone. “Across industries, geographies, and company sizes, organizations have been allocating more resources toward improving ESG. More than 90 percent of S&P 500 companies now publish ESG reports in some form, as do approximately 70 percent of Russell 1000 companies.”11 On the other hand, “among the 8,550 companies in the MSCI All Country World Index, for example, only 0.2% of companies were strongly aligned to the UN SDGs.”12
I believe that ESG may lead to adopting the SDGs at the end of the day. The reasoning is straightforward. ESG is a powerful means for investors like Blackstone to draw the attention of the business community through their vast funds for asset management. Nevertheless, they do not have sophisticated content and criteria with which to convince companies to follow their leadership in ESG.
As shown in
, ESG is a basin-like platform on which the content-loaded SDGs can be stacked. SD Goals 6, 7, 13, 14, and 15 have contents that can be categorized under ‘Environment,’ SD Goals 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 under ‘Society,’ and SD Goals 16 and 17 under ‘Governance.’ Therefore, ESG and the SDGs can be merged into a single entity for corporations to master and follow.
implies that the current movement of ESG may lead to adoption of the SDGs if and when people start to search for content that can fill the three empty basins provided by the ESG movement. In other words, one way to track the progress of ESG is through its alignment with the SDGs. In order to make this happen, we need to conduct research into and learn more about the SDGs in both content and context.
It is in this vein that IPS Switzerland and Franklin University Switzerland have agreed to partner in establishing a new university titled “SDG University.” UNITAR has agreed to oversee the establishment and operation of SDG University. The UN Headquarters, with the blessing of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, endorsed the use of the term “SDG” as the name of the university.
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