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Sustainable Development Goals

At the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in June 2012, the world’s governments agreed to develop a set of sustainable development goals (SDGs). The goals aim to address and incorporate the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development and their interlinkages in a balanced way.

Utility pole in a mountainous area in Vietnam. Photo: UN Photo/Kibae Park

Sustainable Development Goals

ICSU provides input and advice on the SDGs through

Background

At the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in June 2012, the world’s governments agreed to develop a set of sustainable development goals (SDGs). The SDG idea was first put forward by Columbia and Guatemala during the Rio+20 preparatory process. It received widespread support at the Rio+20 conference and is one of the conference’s main outcomes. The Rio+20 outcome document did not give a detailed explanation of the goals but stated that the SDGs should be limited in number, aspirational and easy to communicate.

The goals aim to address and incorporate the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development and their interlinkages in a balanced way. The SDGs should be global in nature and applicable to all countries, developed and developing alike, while taking into account different national realities and capacities. This makes them different from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which are targeted at eradicating extreme poverty and related social ills in developing nations by 2015. The SDGs are supposed to incorporate those MDGs and related targets which will not have been met by 2015, and be coherent with and integrated into the UN development agenda beyond 2015.

An intergovernmental UN Open Working Group (OWG) was set up on 22 January 2013 by the UN General Assembly. It is tasked with developing a set of proposed SDGs during 2013 and 2014, to be submitted to the UN General Assembly for approval in 2015. The UN member states have decided to use a new, constituency-based system of representation. This means that most of the seats in the OWG are shared by several countries.

Strong support for SDGs from the scientific community

The Rio+20 outcome document states that the OWG should develop modalities to ensure the full involvement of relevant stakeholders, including the scientific community and the UN system. In the first State of the Planet Declaration released from the Planet Under Pressure Conference in March 2012, the scientific community strongly supported the proposal for Sustainable Development Goals, asserting that “The research community should be involved in the development of goals, targets and indicators...”.

ICSU is working with the UN to make sure that scientific advice and expertise is available to the OWG, predominantly through expert group meetings, papers on the SDGs and through the work of the Scientific and Technological Community Major Group.

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