Environmental Ethics by Robin Attfield

Author:Robin Attfield
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192517562
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2018-09-10T16:00:00+00:00

The Sustainable Development Goals

In view of the uneven progress in attaining the MDGs, and of criticisms of their content, Colombia suggested in 2011 that they be succeeded by Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the UN secretary-general (Ban Ki-Moon) established in 2012 a task force to establish global goals for the period after the expiry of the MDGs in 2015. These goals were to embody all three of the dimensions of sustainable development, the environmental, economic, and social dimensions, together with their inter-linkages. This process resulted in agreement in 2015 to adopt the current SDGs.

The title of the agenda adopted by the UN General Assembly was ‘Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’. The selected goals attempted to tackle not only global problems but also their causes. Thus the opening goal was the abolition of poverty worldwide, to be tackled in part through reducing gender inequality (recognized to perpetuate poverty). The second goal was the ending of hunger, through attention to improvements to agriculture and nutrition.

Several of the seventeen goals concern environmental sustainability. Thus the goal about health includes a target to reduce deaths and illnesses from pollution-related diseases, which include pulmonary diseases from dust-storms and smog, as well as from carbon emissions. The goal of clean water and sanitation for all could improve the environment for millions, and is widely claimed to be indispensable if any of the other goals are to be achieved, but would require extensive international funding. The related goal of making cities and communities sustainable may promote both cleaner air, urban gardening, and an increased recycling of waste products. Similarly the goal of ‘responsible consumption and production’ requires efforts to make both consumption and production sustainable.

Other goals relate yet more closely to environmental concerns. The goal of climate action calls for efforts to combat climate change both through controlling emissions and through promoting renewable energy (see Figure 4), thus linking with the goal of affordable and clean energy, which requires access for all to energy that is ‘affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern’. (Nothing is said about whether this is meant to include or exclude nuclear energy. But it is again clear that massive international funding will be required to introduce renewable energy systems in developing countries.)

4. San Gorgonio Pass Wind Farm, Palm Springs, California: a key source of renewable energy—making the desert bloom.

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