Rescuing SDGs with Youth-Power

The world faces ever-escalating, cascading and entwined global crises and conflicts. The aspirations set out at the beginning of the 21st century and capsuled by United Nations in Millennium Development Goals and later booster-dosed in 2015 through with a vaccine of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are in jeopardy.

The UN Secretary-General's 2022 annual report on SDGs progress was released recently. The report recommends actions "rescue the SDGs." We are approximately in the middle of the SDGs trajectory. Having agreed in 2015, the target to achieve them is by 2030. Today we are about seven years down the lane. In the remaining time span are we now ready to deploy disaster management and rescue teams?

The report is based on inputs from more than 50 international and regional organizations and available data on the global indicators for the 17 SDGs. The report gives the widely known reasons of COVID-19, violent conflicts and the Ukraine-Russia war.

As regards, SDG 3 on Good Health and well-being has collapsed. End of 2021, more than 5.4 million people globally had died due to COVID-19, with some estimates suggesting excess deaths of almost 15 million. The story of COVID has not even ended as new COVID-19 variants are accompanied by continued vaccine inequity, rising inflation, supply chain disruptions, policy uncertainties, and unsustainable debt in developing countries.

SDG 4 on Quality Education, the report estimates that "147 million children missed more than half of their in-class instruction over the past two years." This generation of children, it underscores, could lose up to USD 17 trillion in combined total lifetime earnings in present value. That is colossal.

I selected these two of 17 SDGs to exemplify the direct impacts on the youth of the world. It also shows that only youth in Universities and Higher Educational Institutes who have gone through suffering can learn the lessons and launch a rescue operation. Movement of Smart Campus Cloud Network (SCCN) is a strong partnership of universities that transform the campus into a living lab of SDGs. Today Digital technologies help in measuring the progress of SDGs on the campus and hence managing them. More importantly, they also facilitate connecting with other universities through a digital cloud to develop partnership-SDG 17. As is known, the partnership has the potential to multiply innovations and speed up the. One plus one is eleven!

The campus is a living lab and also a skilling centre for the youth to shape their future to attain sustainable development.

 Dr Rajendra Shende

Chairman - TERRE Policy Centre,

Former Director UNEP, IIT Alumni,

Prime Mover Smart Campus Cloud Network 

Coordinating lead author of IPCC.