According to him:
1) The idea came from the Rio+20 Summit in 2012 – the largest summit in UN history. Colombia and Guatemala proposed goals to follow on from the Millennium Development Goals, set up in 2000 to halve poverty by 2015. Poverty, as measured by living on less than $1.25 a day, has halved. Setting goals works – in a complex world, organizations and countries can align their agendas and prioritize funding.
2) The new goals are the result of a three-year process involving 83 national surveys engaging over 7 million people, making it the biggest consultation in UN history.
3) Nations finally agreed on a list of 17 goals. Some critics argue that 17 are too many. The goals will not be legally binding, part of a new trend in international policy to prevent endless legal obstructions.
4) The 35-page United Nations text outlining the post-2015 development agenda is available here. “This agenda is a plan of action for people, planet and prosperity,” it says.
5) From governance experts to climate researchers, the academic community largely supports the goals. *The International Council for Science’s independent assessment of the goals gave them a cautious thumbs up.
6) Not everyone agrees. The Lancet described the goals as “fairy tales, dressed in the bureaucratese of intergovernmental narcissism, adorned with the robes of multilateral paralysis, and poisoned by the acid of nation-state failure”.
7) This may be true, but it ignores the fact that the goals have been heavily negotiated, so will never be perfect. Instead, they are about values. However, they have broad legitimacy among all parties – which is a big deal.
8) The concern now is how to make people care about the SDGs. If no one notices them, they won’t attract the attention they need to build momentum. This is a very real issue because the media has largely ignored them to date. British film-maker Richard Curtis aims to bring the goals to 7 billion people. Part one of the plan has been to work with the Swedish designer Jakob Trollbäckto rebrand them as the Global Goals and create an army of #goalkeepers.
9) While the Millennium Development Goals were aimed at poorer countries (more or less), the new goals are designed to be universal. This is a monumental shift in thinking about sustainable development from a worldview where rich nations support poorer nations to develop, towards a view where the actions of all, particularly those in wealthy nations, risk destabilizing important parts of Earth’s life-support system – most obviously the climate, the oceans, biodiversity and the forests.
10) So which country is most likely to complete the goals first? Sweden, according to one report. Norway, Denmark, Finland and Switzerland are close behind.
Is two degrees warming possible?
Everyone's favourite climate goal may not be that useful – or even attainable says www.roadtoparis.info
According to a report on the website, since the 1990s, many in climate policy have held up the idea of 2° as a line not to be crossed. When they say 2°, they mean 2° C warming of the Earth’s average surface temperature, above preindustrial levels. It’s a bit arbitrary and simplistic, but gave policy-makers something to hook onto. Increasingly, however, the validity of this benchmark is being questioned.
In February this year, a paper from the Union of Concerned Scientists warned we are already on track for warming way beyond 2°. Timed for the Doha talks in December 2012, another Nature Climate Change paper argued there’s no way we’ll meet the 2° target without radical emission reduction policies.
One element of the 2° controversy is urgency of action, and how much we will have to do to avoid the benchmark. This can overlap with activities of climate sceptics, or at least it may serve the same interests. As sceptic activity shifts from denial and towards delay and/or dilution of concern, we see people agreeing climate change is happening, just arguing it’s not happening that fast and/ or we don’t need to do much. We might also question the ethics of the idea of 2°, and if society is up for the necessary public debate on such targets, or how to limit global warming. Scientist James Hansen of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, for example, has argued repeatedly, 2° is still way too much and, as Chris Shaw of the University of Sussex argues, we never really had a public debate on this.first published:September 25, 2015, 10:44 ISTlast updated:September 25, 2015, 10:48 IST
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The world leaders are meeting in New York on Thursday to agree the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the successor to the Millennium Development Goals. But what are they and why do they matter? A blog by Owen Gaffney, Director of International Media and Strategy at the Stockholm Resilience Centre for www.roadtoparis.info lists out 10 key facts about the SDGs:
According to him:
1) The idea came from the Rio+20 Summit in 2012 – the largest summit in UN history. Colombia and Guatemala proposed goals to follow on from the Millennium Development Goals, set up in 2000 to halve poverty by 2015. Poverty, as measured by living on less than $1.25 a day, has halved. Setting goals works – in a complex world, organizations and countries can align their agendas and prioritize funding.
2) The new goals are the result of a three-year process involving 83 national surveys engaging over 7 million people, making it the biggest consultation in UN history.
3) Nations finally agreed on a list of 17 goals. Some critics argue that 17 are too many. The goals will not be legally binding, part of a new trend in international policy to prevent endless legal obstructions.
4) The 35-page United Nations text outlining the post-2015 development agenda is available here. “This agenda is a plan of action for people, planet and prosperity,” it says.
5) From governance experts to climate researchers, the academic community largely supports the goals. *The International Council for Science’s independent assessment of the goals gave them a cautious thumbs up.
6) Not everyone agrees. The Lancet described the goals as “fairy tales, dressed in the bureaucratese of intergovernmental narcissism, adorned with the robes of multilateral paralysis, and poisoned by the acid of nation-state failure”.
7) This may be true, but it ignores the fact that the goals have been heavily negotiated, so will never be perfect. Instead, they are about values. However, they have broad legitimacy among all parties – which is a big deal.
8) The concern now is how to make people care about the SDGs. If no one notices them, they won’t attract the attention they need to build momentum. This is a very real issue because the media has largely ignored them to date. British film-maker Richard Curtis aims to bring the goals to 7 billion people. Part one of the plan has been to work with the Swedish designer Jakob Trollbäckto rebrand them as the Global Goals and create an army of #goalkeepers.
9) While the Millennium Development Goals were aimed at poorer countries (more or less), the new goals are designed to be universal. This is a monumental shift in thinking about sustainable development from a worldview where rich nations support poorer nations to develop, towards a view where the actions of all, particularly those in wealthy nations, risk destabilizing important parts of Earth’s life-support system – most obviously the climate, the oceans, biodiversity and the forests.
10) So which country is most likely to complete the goals first? Sweden, according to one report. Norway, Denmark, Finland and Switzerland are close behind.
Is two degrees warming possible?
Everyone's favourite climate goal may not be that useful – or even attainable says www.roadtoparis.info
According to a report on the website, since the 1990s, many in climate policy have held up the idea of 2° as a line not to be crossed. When they say 2°, they mean 2° C warming of the Earth’s average surface temperature, above preindustrial levels. It’s a bit arbitrary and simplistic, but gave policy-makers something to hook onto. Increasingly, however, the validity of this benchmark is being questioned.
In February this year, a paper from the Union of Concerned Scientists warned we are already on track for warming way beyond 2°. Timed for the Doha talks in December 2012, another Nature Climate Change paper argued there’s no way we’ll meet the 2° target without radical emission reduction policies.
One element of the 2° controversy is urgency of action, and how much we will have to do to avoid the benchmark. This can overlap with activities of climate sceptics, or at least it may serve the same interests. As sceptic activity shifts from denial and towards delay and/or dilution of concern, we see people agreeing climate change is happening, just arguing it’s not happening that fast and/ or we don’t need to do much. We might also question the ethics of the idea of 2°, and if society is up for the necessary public debate on such targets, or how to limit global warming. Scientist James Hansen of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, for example, has argued repeatedly, 2° is still way too much and, as Chris Shaw of the University of Sussex argues, we never really had a public debate on this.
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