The SDGs according to expert Jonathon Porritt

2015 was a great year, ended with Paris, historic agreement ratified within a year. But earlier in 2015, we had the signing off on the sustainable development goals, which I prefer to call them sustainable development goals, by the way, not the global goals, which is what some governments, including ours, would have you call them. For me, they’re very significant. They are the first time that the UN machine, if you like, has come up with a vision for bringing all peoples around the world together in a sense of shared economic endeavour, socially just, bio-physically sustainable, with a view to protecting the interests of future generations as well as meeting people’s needs today. Plenty of warm words around that before.

But right now in the 17 high-level objectives and all the targets wrapped up under those objectives, this is the most articulate statement of what we need to do as a family of nations that we’ve ever had. The real story, of course, is implementation, how quickly we’re going to see those goals incorporated into national policy, international agreements, treaty making, and so on, and how quickly businesses can actually respond to these sustainable development goals and direct some of their own corporate sustainability efforts to help deliver against those targets.