The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the SDGs
There are 17 global Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs for short. Together they form the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, an ambitious action plan unanimously adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015.
This adoption was a historic event in that, for the first time in history, the representatives of all the peoples living on Earth jointly identified the greatest challenges facing humanity in their time, and agreed on precise objectives for effectively tackling these challenges in a sustainable way. The preamble to the decision states that “this Agenda is a plan of action for people, planet and prosperity”.
Resolution A/RES/70/1 dated September 25, 2015
Bearing the name Sustainable Development, these global goals have clarified the concept of Sustainable Development, which had been misinterpreted by many and often wrongly reduced to environmental protection alone, omitting its social and economic dimensions. The SDGs cover all the major issues facing our societies, such as poverty, gender equality, health, education, peace and so on.
- The 17 SDGs and the 169 SDG targets
- What does it mean to “contribute to the SDGs”?
- Why assess the impact of an action on the SDGs?
Structure of the 2030 Agenda
In practice, the 2030 Agenda brings together 169 precise and ambitious objectives to be achieved, if possible, by 2030. These 169 objectives are called “SDG targets”. To make them easier to use, they have been grouped into 17 thematic categories. These 17 families of targets are the famous “Sustainable Development Goals”, abbreviated as SDGs, to which 17 different colours have been assigned to facilitate communication and dialogue.
Each of these SDGs has an official title, but this is not very precise and is open to many interpretations. This title is often shortened, as in the SDG logos. In these short titles, the indication of objectives to be achieved has often disappeared, giving the impression that the SDGs are simply thematic areas for action. Examples of SDGs 9 and 4
Examples:
Thus, Sustainable Development Goal 9 is to “Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation”, which is far more ambitious than just the “Industry, innovation and infrastructure” thematic area of its abbreviated form.
Or does SDG 4 aim to “Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all”, which is far more specific than “Quality education”.
But an SDG is much more than its official title. An SDG is the sum total of the 5 to 13 specific, often quantified, targets that make it up. Many of these SDG targets themselves include 2 or 3 distinct objectives which have been combined to reduce the apparent number of objectives.
So, to reach an SDG, you need to reach all its targets. Example of SDG4
For example, SDG4 - Quality Education includes 10 targets relating to distinct areas of action, such as universal access to primary and secondary education, the elimination of any discrimination in schools, well-functioning schools, sufficient training to ensure employability in decent jobs, education for sustainable development (ESD) and the number of qualified teachers.
Leave no one behind
Beyond its list of 169 SDG targets, the 2030 Agenda contains a major cross-cutting principle, that of “leaving no one behind” in the progress that will be made towards these targets. This principle is set out in the preamble to the Resolution and detailed in Article 4.
A coherent, systemic plan
The 2030 Agenda is an extremely rich program. Its ambition to tackle all the major challenges facing humanity means that it brings together a large number of action objectives in a wide variety of fields. This may give the impression of complexity, but in reality it is a highly coherent program reflecting the widespread interdependence of today's world. Established after much discussion, it is a system in the sense that the intention is clearly to progress towards all the targets at once. It would make no sense to progress towards half of the targets while regressing on the other half.
List of SDG targets
The 169 SDG targets are listed in the UN resolution of September 2015. They can also be accessed here.
Indicators for monitoring progress towards global goals
National and UN statistical services track a battery of 232 indicators relating to the various SDG action areas. Most of these indicators measure progress towards the objectives of the SDG targets.
But not all SDG targets have progress indicators. Thus, many actions clearly contribute to progress towards SDG targets but are not detected by any of the 232 indicators. For this reason, the SDG indicators are mainly used to assess the collective progress of a territory or country towards all the SDGs. But they are not sufficient to assess the contribution of a particular action, policy or strategy to the Agenda 2030. Example of water recycling
Example: Building a plant that depollutes the wastewater discharged by a city and then reuses it in an industrial complex or for agricultural irrigation clearly contributes to SDG target 6.3, which aims in particular to "substantially increasing recycling and safe reuse [of water] globally". However, no UN SDG indicator measures the extent of this recycling. This clear progress does not appear in any SDG progress report that uses only indicators. To detect it, we need to use an assessment tool that takes into account the objectives of the 169 SDG targets and is not limited to SDG indicators alone.
The SDG targets set by the Agenda 2030 are global. Achieving them requires the addition of efforts in every country and at every level: institutions, organizations, individuals.
As the Agenda 2030 covers the major challenges facing humanity, a particular action by an institution, organization or individual is likely to concern the thematic area of at least one of the SDGs. But does this action contribute to this SDG? Acting in the field of an SDG is not enough to be able to affirm this. We need to verify that this action creates real progress towards achieving this Goal.
As detailed below, the expression “contributing to the SDGs” can refer to three distinct and precise situations:
- “Contributing to an SDG target”
- “Contributing to an SDG”
- “Contributing to all the SDGs”, i.e. “to the 2030 Agenda”.
“Contributing to a SDG target” or “Contributing to a SDG” is not sufficient to affirm that the action contributes to the 2030 Agenda, as it is necessary to verify that the action respects the systemic character of the latter.
Contributing to a SDG target
Taking action in the thematic area of an SDG target can be very useful, or even essential, without actually contributing to that target. In fact, an action only contributes to a SDG target if it creates a concrete step towards achieving that target, or progress towards that target. It is the accumulation of such advances created by numerous players that can help achieve the expected result. Examples of SDG targets 4.1 and 4.a
Example: Running a secondary school with 600 pupils is very useful but does not have a positive impact on a SDG target because it is simply maintaining what already exists without making any progress towards a global SD objective. Only by opening additional free classes can we contribute to target 4.1 of universal access to primary and secondary education.
Similarly, welcoming pupils with disabilities is not in itself an action impacting a SDG target. It is the improvement in access for the disabled, enabling previously excluded pupils to be admitted, that is progress towards target 4.a.
Contributing to one SDG
As a SDG is a set of targets to be reached, an action can contribute to this SDG if it contributes to at least one of the targets of this goal. However, it must be ensured that progress towards this target is not accompanied by a significant setback in relation to another target of the same SDG. Example impacting targets 4.1 and 4.5
Example: The opening of a new secondary school is likely to create progress towards SDG target 4.1 of universal access to secondary education. But if this new school contains only single-sex toilets or, worse still, has no toilets at all, as is currently the case in 22% of schools, it is an educational act that creates a clear step backwards in relation to the objective of target SDG 4.5 "to eliminate gender disparities in education", in which case it cannot be considered progress towards SDG 4.
Contributing to all the SDGs, i.e. to the Agenda 2030
To contribute to the Agenda 2030, which brings together all the SDGs, an action must :
- have a positive impact on at least one SDG target, i.e. create concrete progress towards achieving the desired result;
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without creating a significant setback to the achievement of another SDG target.
Unfortunately, it's not uncommon for a positive action in one area to have a negative impact in another. This is often unconscious, as the players in a given sector do not necessarily visualize all the consequences of their actions, nor all the SDG targets.
If the action has a positive impact on one SDG target, experience shows that it very often also creates progress towards several other SDG targets.
The 4allSDGs applications help to overcome these difficulties by detecting the positive and negative impacts of a particular action (project, policy, strategy, etc.) on all 169 SDG targets, the UN Agenda 2030 being the reference framework used by these applications. This is the case, of course, of the Education4allSDGs application dedicated to actions in the field of education.
Every area of activity is concerned by all the SDGs and the Agenda 2030.
Experience shows that an action that creates progress towards a SDG target often has an impact on several other targets. The actions of a business sector acting in the thematic area of a SDG can thus contribute not only to that SDG, but also to many others. This means that achieving the targets of an SDG cannot be achieved solely by the actions of specialists in the field concerned, but requires the positive contributions of several other institutions or professional sectors, and often even the actions of part of the population. The systemic nature of the Agenda 2030 means that no SDG can be achieved by the professional sectors of its thematic area alone. Each Goal requires the mobilization of many players, often outside the “silo” of specialists in the field. Example of target ODD 6.4 - Example of target ODD 4.1
Example: Ensuring the sustainable management of water resources, the objective of target SDG 6.4, is a task that obviously concerns water management professionals, but achieving this objective is impossible without positive contributions from energy producers, who are more concerned with SDG 7, farmers, who are more concerned with SDG 2, urban planners, who are more concerned with SDG 11, and even the population as a whole.
Example: "Ensuring that all girls and boys complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education …", objective of target SDG 4.1, requires the involvement of many professions outside the education system, such as social workers specialising in poverty-related problems, transport specialists to ensure that all young people can attend school regardless of their distance, disability specialists to ensure that schools are accessible to all, water and sanitation specialists to ensure that all schools have separate, functional toilets, and so on.
Actors, institutions, organisations or individuals wishing to contribute to the global Sustainable Development Goals need to ensure that their actions create progress towards achieving at least one SDG target without detracting from the achievement of other targets. To do this, they need to identify the positive or negative impacts of these actions on each of the 169 SDG targets. This is a difficult exercise for anyone unfamiliar with the richness of the Agenda 2030.
However, it is essential to identify the negative impacts in order to :
- affirm that the action contributes to all the SDGs, i.e. to the 2030 Agenda;
- assess their relative importance;
- decide on corrective action
- check that other actions will compensate for them
- anticipate the risks of the project being blocked by other players;
- or abandon the project if the negative impacts are too great.
This Education4allSDGs tool enables a non-specialist in the Agenda 2030 to easily identify the positive and negative impacts of an action in the field of Education on all the SDG targets, and also to roughly assess their significance.