Today at 4pm GMT Prof. Murray Hitzman, iCRAG Director, addresses the UNGA76 Science Summit on the topic of Geoscience for the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
The United Nations 2030 Agenda and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals represent the global strategy for achieving a better future for all. Yet, the Earth subsystems required to support the SDGs have been largely ignored. The agenda overlooks the spatial boundaries and geophysical processes of Earth subsystems such as river basins and coastal deltas, and the consequences of environmental feedbacks on the SDGs remain a key knowledge gap. The problem stems in part from the national-level focus of SDG monitoring and reporting, which is of course a matter of pragmatism in global policy, but it is compounded by the lack of geoscience in the SDG debate.
Excellent progress has been made in evaluating how the pursuit of certain SDGs might affect others globally and across different socio-economic contexts, these assessments are invariably performed with countries as the units of analysis instead of Earth subsystems. Recent research has expanded to account for the SDG interactions between countries that are embedded in global trade, but the interactions among SDGs, as well as the overall success of the 2030 Agenda, may look very different if one considers different environmental contexts, different system boundaries, longer timescales, or indeed other indicators beyond those defined by the 2030 Agenda.
For more visit: https://unga76sciencesummit.sched.com