What are the SDGs?
In September 2015, the 2030 Agenda was adopted by all UN member states at the United Nations (UN) summit with the title "Transforming our world: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development". It entered into force on January 1st, 2016 with a term of 15 years. At the heart of the 2030 Agenda are the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs formulate measures and goals on topics such as poverty, gender equality, sustainable growth and climate change mitigation and contain a total of 169 sub-goals to be achieved by 2030.
The SDGs were developed partly on the basis of a predecessor agenda - the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. The novelty of the SDGs compared to the previous agenda is the paradigm shift: While the Millennium Development Goals applied primarily to developing countries, all countries are now to implement the SDGs and thus work together for a sustainable future.
Source: UNICEF Georgia
Milestones in the history of sustainable development
In 1992, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED, also known as the "Earth Summit") took place in Rio de Janeiro, where the work of the CSD Commission on Sustainable Development first began. At the Summit, climate change was identified as a serious problem for the first time and the international community was committed to take action. This was the context in which Agenda 21, the guiding document for development and environmental policy on sustainable development, was created, which set out social, ecological and economic recommendations for action for the 21st century.
In September 2000, following the Millennium Summit, the Millennium Declaration of the United Nations was adopted and eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were formulated, which were supposed to be achieved by 2015. Since then, the MDGs have been an important pillar of international development cooperation.
Twenty years after the World Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the Rio+20 Summit in June 2012 was to review progress on sustainable development. On this occasion, hundreds of heads of state and government as well as representatives of non-governmental organizations, the private sector and other groups from all over the world gathered to deliberate on the two main topics of "A green economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty reduction" and "The institutional framework for sustainable development". An important outcome of the Rio+20 Summit was the decision to negotiate the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). At the 68th session of the UN General Assembly, it was decided to continue the MDGs by incorporating them into the SDGs. In a three-year negotiation process, the 17 SDGs were thus developed and finally entered into force in 2016.
To review the status of implementation, the High Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development (HLPF) is held once a year in New York, where countries can report on the status of SDG implementation.
