Sustainability

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were eight time-bound goals providing concrete, numerical benchmarks for tackling extreme poverty in its many dimensions.

The MDGs included goals and targets on income poverty, hunger, maternal and child mortality, disease, inadequate shelter, gender inequality, environmental degradation and the Global Partnership for Development.

Adopted by world leaders in the year 2000 with the attention of being achieved by 2015, the MDGs were both global and local, tailored by each country to suit specific development needs. 

The eight MDGs below in turn broke down into 21 quantifiable targets that were measured by 60 indicators.

Our current meat-heavy system of food production seems to many unsustainable, a waste of resources and a source of pollution in the form of pesticides and hormones as well as methane gas from livestock manure.

Visiting Luc Schuiten's Vegetal City exhibition in Brussels back in 2009 served as an eye-opening introduction to the potential that biomimicry might play in helping us design a sustainable future.

Many projects are already underway; some young architects are designing structures made completely out of living trees, while others are imagining how our great cities might return to their more natural state.

A related website tried to organise all biological information by function and asked the question - what we can we learn from this organism (e.g. any inventor, anywhere, at the moment of creation, could ask "how does nature remove salt from water?")

"Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done and why. Then do it" - Robert Heinlein

Jane Goodall's Chimp Greeting from The Jane Goodall Institute on Vimeo.

As one of reportedly fewer than 10 people ever to be invited to study for a PhD at Cambridge without a prior undergraduate degree, Jane Goodall was promptly told by "experts" there that all her field work on chimpanzee behaviour was wrong, and that she should not anthropomorphise them with names, still less assign them thoughts, personalities and emotions.

Today, we know that she was right and they were wrong.

Imagine anyone being able to travel virtually anywhere...such as along the Trans Siberian Railway.  No substitute for the original, certainly, but perhaps a relatively green way nonetheless of democratising curiosity.

Imagining a "new we"...emerging from the broad spectrum of lifestyle possibilities available in a variety of new sustainable communities around the world.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a proposed set of global targets adopted by governments that business can help achieve. There are currently 17 goals (see below) with 169 indicators to help define progress. Driven by the UN adopting an 'inclusive and transparent intergovernmental process open to all stakeholders' the SDGs launch in September 2015 at the UN Summit. They're going to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) which were good, but fell short, because they were focused on poverty alleviation in the developing world, whereas the SDGs are globally applicable and integrate economic, social and environmental aspects. Expectations are high for the SDGs.

The Royal Society of Arts gathered a high-profile panel of speakers to explore the hidden agendas behind our values and attitudes toward the place of ‘the human’ in today’s societies, and debate what must now be a key issue for the 21st century.

• A rare problem - The Economist
• Analysis shows nuclear energy competitive with other baseload power sources - International Energy Agency
• Arctic melting will cost the global economy £33 trillion by end of next century, scientists calculate - Futurology
• CEO pulse on climate change - PwC

• A greener China - and what it might mean for the rest of the world - PwC
• Africa's dry forests key to food security - Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR)