Amahleen

So, let us start with the basics. What is the 2030 Agenda? What exactly is it that is going on right now?

The United Nations Sustainable Development Summit is happening in New York right now, and it will be happening for the next three days. It’s a meeting between world leaders where the aim is to all agree on the formulation of the 2030 Agenda and its 17 sustainable development goals and their 196 sub-targets. The meeting will take the whole weekend, but already the Agenda has been adopted, and we now have a world Agenda for the next 15 years. The Agenda will, to put it simply, dictate the approach of the UN in their work, both how they work internally and how they work with their member states and other partners. It will also have a huge impact on how countries tackle the different challenges that they are facing in everything from environmental sustainability, to education, poverty elevation and gender equality, just to mention a few.

Worth noting is that the negotiating part of the 2030 Agenda (where member states argues about if they should use this word instead of that, and other things that surprisingly will have much bigger implications than one might think) is more or less done. The draft of the goals has been negotiated and worked on since 2012 and he Rio+20 conference, and will most likely be adopted in their entirety at this stage.

Right now we are on the speeches part of the summit - a lot of world leaders singing the praise of and highlighting importance of the 2030 Agenda and sustainable development. It’s a lot of repetitions, and a lot of reprimands for people going over the 5 minute time limit. BUT it is also very interesting. You can watch it with me by following the below link:  

http://webtv.un.org/

So today the meeting in the UN headquarters in New York starts that aims at adopting the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. It would be a little strange if this blog didn’t talk at all about this exciting thing. So talk about it we will. Starting with sharing the link to the UN site where you can see live broadcasts from the meeting. Exciting huh? Stay tuned for more interesting posts!

(via Podcast Special - Sustainable Development Part 2!)

The second part of the podcast is up!  We are very proud of it and I would love it if you took some time and listened to it. (I would love it even more if you would take some more time afetr you are done and let me know what you think of it). We continue our discussion about sustainable development and we return to the experts to see what they are doing to work with this issue, and if they have a positive outlook on the future. Very interesting stuff indeed. 

Give it a listen and let me know what you think :)

(via Podcast Special - Sustainable Development Part 1)

This is a special little podcast about Sustainable Development that I would be super excited if you litened to. It’s superawesome. And the best part? It’s only part one of two! Miha and I (Laura) decided to get to the bottom of what Sustainable Development actually is, and, maybe more importantly, what people think sustainable development is. We talked to both experts and other university students and each other.