Humanitarian and Environmental Agendas Part II: Reconciliation

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En provenance du cours de Yonsei University

Sustainable Development in the 21st Century with Ban Ki-moon

18 notes

Yonsei University

Sustainable Development in the 21st Century with Ban Ki-moon

18 notes

The course is designed for people that want to learn about the latest development agenda the international community agreed to achieve by 2030. Structured around the five pillars of Agenda 2030 – people, prosperity, planet, peace and justice, and partnership, students will learn that these pillars are interconnected and need to be integrated in practical policy-making and operational activities for development, in both developed and developing country settings. Following an introductory module on the main concepts of Agenda 2030 and the SDGs, successive modules will provide the foundation behind the SDGs for people, prosperity and planet, peace and partnership. A final module will explore the way forward and provide channels that the young generation can participate to integrate the SDGs in the policy-making of the students’ resident countries. To get a better idea of our course, we welcome you to take a look at our promotional video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KATSb73TeB4

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Youth & SDG Implementation

In this last module, we will look into the role of youth in the implementation of the SDGs. While the previous modules focused on the 5 “Ps” in the achievement of the SDGs, this module looks into the importance of tertiary education and the roles that universities play in mainstream education for sustainable development. This module also examines the empowerment and mobilizing of youth to become the enablers of the SDGs.

Humanitarian and Environmental Agendas Part I: The Tensions6:25

Humanitarian and Environmental Agendas Part II: Reconciliation7:14

Citizen-Led Accountability Part I8:22

Citizen-Led Accountability Part II8:45

Rencontrer les enseignants

Ban Ki-moon
Distinguished Chair Professor
Institute for Global Engagement and Empowerment

At the dawn of a new millennium the world started to wake up to the fact that

perhaps the current path of development was unsustainable.

Now, you can start to see the interent tension between, on the one hand,

the need to lift one citizens out of extreme poverty,

and the recognition that industrialization was causing the planet to burn.

After all, if industrialization has been

the principal driver of lifting people out of poverty over the last 150,

200 years, how do you morally tell a country that they can't do the same thing?

Now to be fair, this tension was identified some years ago.

In fact, all the way back to 1992 in the Rio Earth Summit

following the leadership of then Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Brundtland,

you did have this concept of sustainable development start to emerge.

The very idea that every country has a right to development,

but it should be done in a way which is conscious of our impact on the planet.

Critically though, environmental concerns caught into this concept of

sustainable development cannot be used as an excuse to deny a country's right to develop,

and the developed world has an obligation,

as the collection of countries with

the greatest responsibility for climate change so far,

to support this development,

ensure it is done in the right manner,

and that poorer countries are ultimately not penalized.

However, for a long time after 1992 the two agendas,

climate change on the one hand,

and an extreme poverty on the other,

and the movements behind them rarely spoke to one another.

The narratives, the stories that campaigners told rarely interacted with one another.

It was as if the two were completely separate.

There were lots of blame games,

and finger pointing that stalled agreement for a long time.

At worst, it seemed that the success of one of

these agendas would be to the detriment of the other,

it was seen as a zero sum game.

Fast forward to 2009,

and you saw this tension vividly played out in a 2009 Copenhagen climate negotiations.

Despite the high expectations of campaigners,

the world failed to secure a global agreement on carbon emissions,

and what became rapidly apparent in the media and around the world,

was that there was a great impasse emerging between developed countries on the one hand,

and emerging countries on the other.

Emerging countries who quite rightly were saying,

why should we be penalized?

Why should we not have the ability to lift our citizens out of extreme poverty?

And what if you want us to reduce our carbon emissions,

or put a cap on our growth,

what are you going to do to help us meet the expectations of our citizens?

Finally, several years after that in 2015,

things reached a fever pitch.

Thanks to the leadership of many individuals,

but in particular one individual that stands

out is former Secretary General of the UN Ban Ki Moon.

Thanks to his leadership,

deals and trade-offs were made.

You saw China and the US,

the two biggest carbon emitters,

under Xi Jinping and Obama come together in a landmark agreement in 2014.

Out goes inconvenient truth to follow up to that inconvenient sequel,

shows how this tension played out between emerging countries,

developed countries, and actually how in some respects it started to be solved.

You saw how India's support for a global agreement was partly achieved,

through businesses agreeing to donate technology at zero cost to

developed countries that would allow them to adapt to a low-carbon emission world.

Other initiatives like the Green Climate Fund also

began pledging and promising to provide finance countries,

to help countries mitigate climate change,

and also adapt to its worst impacts.

Now, whilst this was going on in 2015,

and it looked like finally the world was starting to achieve

a breakthrough and these two agendas were starting to come together,

activists from each movement were starting to talk to one another,

policy makers were realizing that perhaps

there is a way to mitigate climate change and also

meet the aspirations of citizens

around the world looking for a way out of extreme poverty.

We got to play a small role, my organization,

Global Citizen, we were asked by the president of the World Bank,

Jim Kim, to organize a big event as

finance ministers converged in Washington D.C. in April 2015.

We did the event on Earth Day,

it was called Global Citizen Earth Day.

Some 270,000 people gathered together on the National Mall.

They chanted out and they cried for sustainable development,

they cried for agreement to end extreme poverty by

2030 and mitigate climate change once and for all.

Finance ministers just across the road could hear this noise,

they could hear it loud and clear,

and Kim himself played a key role in showing the world just how it was possible to end

extreme poverty by 2030 while

simultaneously avoiding the worst effects of climate change.

The paring together of these two agendas,

and the coming together of the movements behind them,

finally resulted in agreement in late 2015,

at the United Nations of the Sustainable Development Goals.

A 17 point plan by the UN to reduce the spread of inequality and extreme poverty,

and mitigate climate change.

Just a few months later,

you had the historic Paris Climate Agreement come together in December 2015, in Paris.

Moving beyond the developed developing country dichotomy,

which had characterized and stored negotiations for a long time, these agreements,

the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change,

provide a road map for ending extreme poverty,

and crucially for the first time put a deadline on achieving that goal, 2030.

But also, critically, what that road map provides,

is a way for ending extreme poverty in a way that does not boil the planet.

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