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Securing a Sustainable Future
Securing a Sustainable Future
When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote that “All that is solid melts into air,” they intended it as a metaphor for the disruptive transformations that the Industrial Revolution implied for established social norms. Today, their words can be taken literally: Carbon-dioxide emissions and other industrial pollutants released into the atmosphere are changing the planet – with huge implications for the environment, health, population movements, and social justice. The world is at a crossroads, and much of the progress we have made in these areas could vanish into thin air.
In 2007, Nelson Mandela founded The Elders to address just such risks, mandating this independent group of former leaders to “speak truth unto power.” That is what we will do at the launch of the new Sustainable Development Goals at the United Nations General Assembly later this month.
The SDGs will succeed the Millennium Development Goals, which guided international development efforts from 2000-2015. The MDGs helped millions of people escape illiteracy, disease, and hunger, and placed development at the heart of the global political agenda. However, their overall impact was often inadequate, particularly in fragile, conflict-ridden states – and they failed to include sustainability in their targets.
The SDGs represent a quantum leap forward, because they recognize the vital links among challenges – including poverty in all its forms, gender inequality, climate change, and poor governance – that must be addressed in tandem. Seventeen separate goals may seem unwieldy, but their cumulative effect should mean that no topic or constituency falls through the cracks. Sustainability is finally being integrated into global development, in line with what campaigners have been demanding for decades.
Read more at https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/the-elders-climate-change-development-goals-by-gro-harlem-brundtland-and-graca-machel-2015-09#BclpXhWB8kPKcmlP.99
The end of global development as we know it | News | Engineering for Change
The end of global development as we know it | News | Engineering for Change.
Development professionals do their work under the assumption that the developing world will some day look a lot like the developed world. But there’s a good chance that they’re wrong. A practical look at the world’s energy supply, and interesting new research into the link between energy, culture and quality of life, shows that the reverse is probably true: The developed world will soon look more like the developing world. Here’s why that’s happening and what we can do to prepare for a big change right now.
From farmers to desk jockeys
Since the early 1990’s, the US government has not counted “farmers” as a category in the national census, and that is a symptom of energy consumption. Diesel fuel, chemical fertilizers and pesticides are all forms of energy that have supplanted human and animal muscle on the farm. This energy, that comes from cheap, accessible fossil fuels, has turned the agrarian serfs of the middle ages into today’s corporate, government, and academic “cubicle serfs,” in developed countries. And global development professionals are trying to shepherd the developing world along the same path.
Fossil energy has facilitated three doublings of the global population since the eighteenth century, while erecting a byzantine techno-social hierarchy in the developed world and in the power centers of the developing world.
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