MARQUETTE, Michigan — According to an interview recently published in SciDev.Net, Jeffrey Sachs, director of U.N. initiative, Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), believes there could be an end to poverty by the year 2030.
Sachs said that the ‘zero draft’ on Sustainable Development Goals, released this past June, is on a very good track.
The groups working on this draft aim to tackle specific issues relating to poverty. This includes setting up models for sustainable agriculture in urban communities, raising necessary funds, preparing documents to inform large governmental institutions about important issues and providing a platform for showcasing the progress of the initiative on a worldwide stage.
“We need to find ways and venues to be heard. SDSN will bring together scientists and world leaders at Columbia University on the 22nd of September, the day before the UN Climate Summit meeting, precisely for the kind of briefing that sometimes the leaders don’t hear,” Sachs said.
According to Sachs, there is a highly scientific basis for believing an end to worldwide poverty is near and the goal of publishing the zero draft is to inform the public about it.
“What science has been telling us is that extreme poverty can be ended. This [initiative]is a global set of goals for humanity that cut across the core objectives,” Sachs said. “The purpose of these goals in part will be to help mobilize and organize the various scientific communities, in health, in energy, human settlements and climate change.”
While Sachs acknowledges that many U.N. initiatives begin as moves to garner political leverage and may not be based on scientific data, he maintains that this is not the case with the zero draft and its’ proposed Sustainable Development Goals.
One goal of the initiative is to push important warnings by ecologists regarding climate change and the sixth great planetary extinction to the U.N. Sachs wants the U.N. to take these threats seriously and help to fund programs that would protect the world’s poor in such a catastrophe.
The SDSN is working in two overlapping phases. One phase is to engage in setting meaningful goals daily. The other is to create a network of research institutions, universities, laboratories and national corporations to help with the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Sach hopes that after 2015, nations will have Sustainable Development Goal programs and be required to report on them to U.N. leaders.
If their efforts are not successful, they will be held accountable.
Sachs said that while aiming to end global poverty in the next fifteen years may sound lofty and ambitious to some, it is completely within the realm of possibility in our modern technological age.
For the full interview with Jeffrey Sach go to SciDev.net
– Paige Frazier
Sources: SciDev.net 1, SciDev.net 2, SciDev.net 3, UN
Photo: MRFCJ