Challenging The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

Maitland Hyslop

In late August 2022 Dr Maitland Hyslop, a Senior Lecturer in the School of Aviation and Security responded to a request from the organisers of the UN General Assembly 77 Science Summit to challenge current thinking around the United Nations (UN) Special Development Goals (SDGs). In September of 2015, the UN General Assembly officially accepted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The agenda outlined the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, which were created to ensure that, as the world moves forward, no country is being “left behind” in the transition to sustainable development.

The 17 goals were designed with the aim of reducing the risk and impact of disasters. They are:

‐ No poverty;

‐ Zero hunger;

‐ Good health and well-being;

‐ Quality education;

‐ Gender equality;

‐ Clean water and sanitation;

‐ Affordable and clean energy;

‐ Decent work and economic growth;

‐ Industry, innovation and infrastructure;

‐ Reduced inequalities;

‐ Sustainable cities and communities;

‐ Responsible consumption and production;

‐ Climate action;

‐ Life below water;

‐ Life on land;

‐ Peace, justice and strong institutions;

‐ And securing partnerships for the above goals.

Maitland, in collaboration with Professors Andrew Collins of Northumbria University and Professor David Alexander of UCL, presented a new way of viewing the Goals based on a system wide approach that recognising the increasing relevance of Chaos / Fauda. Intersectionality and the potential impact of ‘Big Data’ at a local level. These three factors were seen to directly emphasise the importance of a systems approach over the existing silos.

The context of the world has changed significantly in recent years with the general emergence from (but not disappearance of) COVID-19 in many places alongside new and ongoing armed conflicts worldwide. These two trends have focussed the attention of the developed world on resilience in health and on conflict issues as never before, and have heightened the need for cybersecurity in a way not covered by the Sustainable Development Goals. This has also demonstrated the necessity of a fresh review with the aim of ensuring that the 2030 goals are met with mindful consideration of the risks and dependencies that can shape the future.

These new contexts have also foregrounded the subject of risk appetite. Managing by risk appetite is a process that seeks to maximise organisational efficiency by optimising risk approaches. In the face of new threats and a different approach to regulation banks have started to look at directing and managing their technology and cyber business risk through the lens of risk appetite – an approach that is likely to spread to many more organisations. Risk appetite is a potentially interesting and positive approach for banks, business and industry –but it is not, however, a good approach for SDGs where risk needs to be reduced, as all the SDGs depend on a level of physical and cyber resilience for success. These dependencies have clearly changed and evolved over the last few years, particularly in regard to cybersecurity.

The world has become a more chaotic place since the goals were written, and cyber threats are responsible for much of that chaos, especially in the western and developing worlds. Because of this the relevance, success, and interrelationship of the SDGs has changed, and the SDGs are clearly at risk – meaning that something needs to be done to take into account potential disasters that are increasingly multiple in source and origin, and which require a systems, mathematical and risk based approach, rather than a binary one. Therefore the SDGs, whilst helpful in many ways, are increasingly inappropriate. Just as it was important for the business continuity community to move from a business continuity plan to the ‘Hardening’ of organisations so it is important for disaster risk reduction to move from the SDGs to a ‘Fauda’ Disaster Systems Management approach involving Intersectionality and Big Data applied at local level – and BNU team is delighted to be continuing the conversation with the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) in Geneva in 2023.