Last week, the United Nations released an ambitious global development agenda that serves as a blueprint for action for the next 15 years in the areas of poverty, inequality and climate change. Known as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), they replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which expired this year. The SDGs – 17 in all – took three years of negotiations between world leaders before they were adopted by the 193 member states of the United Nations as the agreed-upon priorities that would form the basis of global policy making until 2030.
As the opening speaker of the development summit meeting at the UN General Assembly last week, Pope Francis’s central message – caring for our planet and the world’s most vulnerable citizens – reinforced the principles of the SDGs, and set the stage for the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference to be held in Paris later this year. The hope is to achieve a global climate treaty by the end of the year that is legally binding and commits countries to cuts in carbon emissions and the creation of a global fund to help those nations most severely impacted by climate change.
China has already outlined its cap-and-trade policy in 2017; the United States, the European Union, Brazil, and Indonesia have revealed their plans as to how they plan to cut emissions. Earlier this morning, India, the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, submitted its commitment that it will cut intensity of carbon emissions by 33-35 percent by 2030 from 2005 levels, while still maintaining that its priority is to address its entrenched poverty.
Do the new SDGs go far enough? What’s the likelihood that world leaders can arrive at a climate treaty when there’s such a sharp division between major players like EU countries and the U.S. on the one hand and newly emerged economic powerhouses like India and China on the other?
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Shyama Venkateswar is Director of the Public Policy Program at Roosevelt House and Distinguished Lecturer at Hunter College. In this capacity, she leads the Public Policy Program’s undergraduate curriculum, teaches the senior Capstone Seminar, co-manages faculty initiatives, works closely with city & state agencies for student internships, manages adjuncts, and directs a scholars program funded by the Jewish Foundation for Education of Women. She is a regular columnist for Roosevelt House’s website on a variety of national and global policy issues on conflict resolution, food security, women’s leadership, criminal justice reform, among others. She has almost twenty years of experience in research, policy and advocacy focusing on social justice issues, both in the U.S. and globally. Before coming to Hunter College, she worked at the National Council for Research on Women (NCRW), where she served as Director of Research & Programs, and helped provide the vision and strategic direction for the Council’s policy agenda on economic security for low-income women, diversity in higher education and the corporate arena, women’s leadership, and ending global violence against women. She is co-author of two NCRW reports, Caring for Our Nation’s Future; and The Challenge and the Charge: Strategies for Retaining and Advancing Women of Color in addition to numerous commentary and opinion pieces on poverty, job creation, peace-building, and immigrant rights published in The Miami Herald, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Asia Times, The Indian Express, and the Chicago Sun-Times. She has given Congressional briefings, and presented her research findings to academic, policy, advocacy and corporate audiences. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University and is a graduate of Smith College.
