In September 2015, the 193 United Nations Member States adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to be achieved by 2030. These 17 SDGs set ambitious goals for the 5 Ps: People, Planet, Prosperity, Peace and Partnerships. Each community, each territory, each country is invited to adopt this universal Agenda, the challenge being to build and implement collectively constructed roadmaps adapted to these different contexts.
The purpose of this advanced course is to inform, sensitize, and encourage mobilization around these SDGs. First of all, it proposes a detailed study of the state of humanity and the planet in 2019, a situation that allows us to understand the idea and reaffirm the need for SDGs. Beyond a presentation of these objectives, their targets and their monitoring indicators, the course examines, based on an analysis and examples, one of the major difficulties encountered in making these SDGs operational: managing the contradictions between some of their targets. Finally, a study of what is possible to do concretely is proposed. The role of public, economic, financial, media and associative stakeholders is thus examined, as well as the equally important role of citizens and youth.
This introduction provides an overview and a first analysis of the current situation in the world with regard to the 17 SDGs. The data is based on the Global Sustainable Development Report published in September 2019 (GSDR 2019), a reference document that shows how far we have to go by 2030. Focuses are proposed on the issues of inequalities, planetary boundaries and adaptation to global change.