School of Sustainability

Ten years in, the goals are off track and still in use

Every year the United Nations publishes a progress report on the Sustainable Development Goals, and every year the conclusion lands the same way: the targets agreed in 2015 will not be met by 2030, and most are well off course. The report arrives, is noted, and the work continues or stalls largely where it stood before. Peter Gringinger, who coordinates SDG programmes for Gaia Education, has written a short booklet asking the obvious question this cycle provokes - whether the framework is still worth anything.

His answer is yes, with qualifications. Whatever the aggregate failure, the decade since adoption has brought clean water, electricity, health care and digital connections to very large numbers of people, and the great majority of countries continue to work inside the framework even as a vocal few turn dismissive. Gringinger's list of what acceleration would actually take is blunt about the obstacles: end wars and move military spending towards development, set up long-term investment plans, tax globally to pay for global public goods. None of it is a communications problem.

Gaia Education's own contribution sits at the other end of the scale from global taxes. Since 2016 the organisation has produced flashcards - endorsed by UNESCO - a free Multipliers Handbook, and workshop materials designed so that a school, a local council, a small charity or a community group can pick the framework up and apply it to its own patch. The booklet under discussion grew out of a LinkedIn newsletter series and is offered as a free download, an entry ramp rather than a destination.

It is worth being plain that this is advocacy from an organisation whose training work is built around the goals, so its conclusion was never in doubt. But the question it raises is a real one, and the honest detail in the piece is not the defence of the framework - it is the acknowledgment that most people working in sustainability know what unfinished projects feel like, and that change usually arrives late, partial and differently shaped than planned.

Gaia Education · Read the source