Ethics in Action for Sustainable Development Edited by
JEFFREY D. SACHS,
Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, Owen Flanagan, William Vendley, Anthony Annett, & Jesse Thorson Foreword by Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew
INTRODUCTION J E F F R E Y D. SAC H S A N D OW E N F L A N AGA N
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he Ethics in Action initiative set out to find a moral consensus on the concept of sustainable development and a practical common agenda regarding the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Religious leaders, philosophers, theologians, economists, and practitioners from a variety of disciplines were summoned to discern and discuss whether their respective religious and intellectual traditions—divergent in many ways— nonetheless shared a common concern for the social, economic, and environmental aims expressed in the framework of the SDGs. It is said that in polite company one doesn’t talk about politics or religion. In this volume, we do pretty much both, yet find the company to be very polite indeed.
From Stockholm to Rio: A Brief History of Sustainable Development The concept of sustainable development is a half-century in the making. In June 1972, the United Nations convened an international conference on the environment—the first of its kind—in Stockholm. The United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (also known as the Stockholm Conference) was a wake-up call for the world. In recognition of an impending collision between the environment and the economy, world leaders came together to discuss the rapid growth of the world economy and population in the context of a finite Earth and limited resources. They recognized, in the first global
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diplomatic gathering of its kind, that ever-increasing economic activity, including the increasing use of primary resources and burning of fossil fuels, would put the earth’s resources and environment under greater and greater stress. Not coincidentally, a pivotal book was published the same year: The Limits to Growth. This book presented a computer model commissioned by the Club of Rome to investigate the same challenge: global economic growth combined with the reality of limited physical resources. The authors argued that, if the geometric growth of the world economy were to continue with the technologies then in place, the resource burden on the planet would eventually become so great that the world economy would overshoot the carrying capacity of the planet, leading to a deep ecological, social, and economic crisis in the twenty-first century. After 1972, many scholars went to work to understand the environmental threats ahead, and especially ways to combine economic progress with a safe environment. In 1987, a global commission led by Norway’s prime minister and leading stateswoman, Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, called on the world to adopt the concept of sustainable development. The way Dr. Brundtland’s commission put it in 1987 was that sustainable development means “meeting the needs of today’s generation in a way that will enable future generations to meet their needs.” In short, “Don’t wreck the planet and leave a disaster for future generations.” Twenty years after the Stockholm Conference, the United Nations convened a follow-up conference, this time in Rio de Janeiro. The 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (also known as the Rio Earth Summit) was called with the aim of adopting and putting into motion a global action plan to solve the challenges that had been identified in 1972. The Rio Earth Summit adopted the Brundtland Commission framework of sustainable development and arrived at three major environmental agreements: (1) The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), to fight human-induced climate change; (2) the Convention on Biological Diversity, to prevent an impending disaster of ecosystem destruction and species extinction; and (3) the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, to stop the spread of land degradation and deserts in the world’s dryland regions. In the ensuing years, vested-interest politics, geopolitical discord, unchecked greed, and shortsightedness thwarted the implementation of the three treaties, and the overall framework of sustainable development. Especially notable was the failure of the Kyoto Protocol, an agreement adopted in 1997 to realize the goals of the UNFCCC. The United States failed to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, and the protocol’s aims were little heeded by many other countries. As a result, there was little action between 1992 and 2015 in implementing the climate change treaty. The United States, once a world leader on the environment, became a laggard, but hardly the only one. The three major environmental agreements of the Rio Earth Summit were most notable for the failure to promote real action.
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New glimmers of diplomatic hope were raised in the year 2000 on the eve of the new millennium. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan put before the world a set of objectives to address global poverty and its various manifestations in poor health, epidemic disease, hunger, illiteracy, and lack of access to safe water and sanitation. The world governments adopted the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as a framework of shared action for the period from 2001 to 2015. The MDGs offered some fresh, if fragile, hope that the world’s governments could work together on the sustainable development agenda. In 2012, forty years after the Stockholm Conference and twenty years after the Rio Earth Summit, the world’s governments assembled once again in Rio at the UN Conference on Sustainable Development. Their purpose was to review progress on the sustainable development agenda set in Rio in 1992. The Rio+20 Conference was in many ways a downcast conference. All of the evidence presented at the conference showed the dramatic shortfall of results after 1992. While the MDGs offered a source of some hope and satisfaction that progress against poverty was feasible and taking place, the ledger on environmental sustainability looked especially grim. Not one of the three treaties was being properly implemented. Human-induced climate change was accelerating; the collapse of biodiversity was ongoing and dramatic; and the world’s dryland regions continued to suffer from ongoing land degradation. The premonitions of overshoot first put forward in The Limits to Growth seemed to be ever closer to reality.
The Sustainable Development Goals and Laudato si’ Yet once again, the governments refused to give up. Drawing hope from the MDGs, and guidance from the sustainable development agenda adopted in 1992, the governments decided to adopt the SDGs as a post-2015 successor to the MDGs. By adopting the concept of SDGs in 2012, for implementation after 2015, the UN members states gave themselves three years to negotiate a new set of global goals based on the sustainable development concept. During this time, the UN member states deliberated, discussed, negotiated, and debated the new goals. They recognized that the world faced three interconnected challenges: promoting economic development, reducing the vast inequalities of income and wealth within their societies as well as across nations, and finally putting into place more decisive actions to head off major environmental disasters, including human-induced climate change, the collapse of ecosystems and biodiversity, and the mega-pollution choking the air, land, soils, waterways, and oceans. Following three years of negotiation, on September 25, 2015, the UN member states unanimously adopted Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, including the seventeen SDGs for 2030 (https://
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sdgs.un.org/goals). The goals for the year 2030 can be summarized as follows: 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 production and consumption, climate action, healthy oceans, sustainable ecologies, peace and justice, and international cooperation to meet these goals. The 2030 Agenda thereby constitutes a holistic agenda that combines economic, social, and environmental objectives, with sustainable development as the core organizing framework for global cooperation. Achieving the policy aims expressed in the SDGs requires money, scientific and technological savvy, and international cooperation, and especially the political efforts of communities ranging from the local level to the UN General Assembly. Yet these political efforts require strong cooperation and shared visions among highly diverse cultures and populations, both within and across nations. Moreover, the diverse peoples of the earth are members of many different religious traditions, with distinctive histories, rituals, theologies, and ethics. And there is also a large and growing group of people who are unaffiliated with any religion but who are also steeped in distinctive philosophical traditions; for example, post-enlightenment humanists in the North Atlantic and various stripes of morally serious socialists and communists in former Soviet countries and in China. To what extent do the world’s religious and ethical traditions support the ethos of the 2030 Agenda? Might there be an overlapping moral consensus, sometimes called an unforced consensus, on the SDGs that spans these diverse sacred and secular traditions? Through its tradition of social teachings, the Roman Catholic Church, for example, has called the world to higher visions of social equity and human flourishing. Notably, in 1891, Pope Leo XIII wrote a pathbreaking encyclical titled Rerum novarum, meaning “Of the New Things.” Leo XIII highlighted the historical novelties of the industrial age and raised profound concerns about the challenges it would pose to human societies, thus beginning the modern era of Catholic social teaching: What ought we to do if millions of workers in hard labor and factories are put out of their jobs? How ought companies, workers, and employers behave? In 2015, Pope Francis carried on the legacy of the Church’s social teachings with the issuance of his remarkable encyclical Laudato si’. In this magisterial work, Pope Francis takes up the environmental crisis in its ethical dimensions and focuses on the duties of stewardship and responsibility that we have toward the planet and toward each other. He links the Church’s conception of human dignity (imago dei) with our collective responsibility to take care of both each other and the physical earth. Laudato si’ calls us to an integral ecology that recognizes the essential relationality or interconnectedness of all things.
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Importantly, the powerful moral and spiritual statement of Laudato si’ constitutes an institutional, religious expression of the challenges and ethos of the SDGs. In fact, the encyclical was published three months before the adoption of the SDGs, and Pope Francis opened the September 25, 2015, UN General Assembly session at which the SDGs were adopted, speaking to world leaders about the urgent need for a common plan for our common home, thereby deeply linking the remarkable religious and moral vision of Laudato si’ with the powerful political and diplomatic statement of the 193 member states of the United Nations. On December 12, 2015, just a few weeks after the adoption of the SDGs, the same 193 member states of the UN came together once again, in Paris, to adopt the Paris Agreement on climate change. The Paris Agreement is the world’s operational agreement on how to address the dire crisis of human-induced climate change. The agreement put the climate agenda squarely within the broader context of sustainable development, meaning that climate change should be fought in a manner that also fosters economic progress and social inclusion. Climate change, though dire, is not a stand-alone objective but part of a larger ethical framework. In Laudato si’, Pope Francis writes that our interdependence—with each other and with the planet—“obliges us to think of one world with a common plan.” That is precisely what the 2030 Agenda and the Paris Agreement aim to achieve. And the objective of one world with a common plan is the driving force of our search for an overlapping consensus among the world’s diverse religious and philosophical traditions.
Ethics in Action and the Possibility of Moral Leadership Based on a Shared Consensus In the wake of the momentous declarations and agreements of 2015, a number of us around the world from major faiths, philosophical traditions, and the development practitioner community, decided that we should explore the possibility of a shared global ethics of achieving these objectives. We return to the question posed earlier: Might there be an unforced or overlapping moral consensus on the SDGs among the diverse sacred and secular traditions around the world? Ethics in Action is an initiative designed to answer this question by assessing the degree of consensus among several great world religions and secular traditions on the SDGs, and to mobilize this consensus into moral capital that can be deployed to help each nation-state and the collection of nation-states to achieve the SDGs. Ethics in Action was hosted by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and supported by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network,
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Religions for Peace, the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, and the University of Notre Dame. It counted on the generous philanthropic support of several founding benefactors, including the Blue Chip Foundation, the Fetzer Institute, Christina Lee Brown, and Jacqueline Corbelli. Between October 2016 and December 2018, Ethics in Action convened religious leaders and theologians from major faiths, philosophers, academic experts, and practitioners from around the world to enter into a shared dialogue on supporting the common good and asked questions including the following: Which are the religious or ethical values that are common across the world’s major faiths and ethical traditions that can be brought to bear to help motivate and expedite the worldwide process to achieve the goals set by the global community, including the crucial targets of the 2030 Agenda, the seventeen SDGs, and the Paris Agreement? Ten thematic meetings were held, usually in Vatican City, to explore the following challenges for sustainable development: poverty, environmental justice, business, peace and conflict, migration and the refugee crisis, the challenges of Indigenous peoples, the future of work, corruption and governance, human trafficking and justice for the marginalized, and education. Each meeting was attended by the members of our core team—the Ethics in Action Working Group—and scholars and practitioners with expertise on the meeting’s topic. At the end of each meeting, the group produced a consensus statement to capture the general moral congruency of our respective religious traditions or philosophical communities on these issues. This core group included representatives of seven world religions—Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism and other traditional Chinese religions—and a handful of secular thinkers. One might compare the aim of Ethics in Action to an earlier UN initiative that also sought and located an unforced and overlapping moral consensus: the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Despite the fact that the concept of human rights has its origins in Western liberal thinking, thirty universal rights were enumerated with the help of representatives of many cultural, religious, and ethical traditions. As with the SDGs, all 193 members of the UN are now signatories to one or more treaties that advance the UDHR. Ethics in Action aimed to identify the same kind of overlapping consensus among the world’s cultural and religious traditions to achieve “one world with a common plan.” Our meetings were ecumenical, but there are some caveats. First, the seven represented religions are not, of course, all the religions of the world—of which there are more than four thousand. By most measures, adherents of the seven included religions make up more than 50 percent of the world’s population. Second, all these religions have great variation internally, which was not always adequately represented. There are orthodox, conservative, and reform Jews; Sunni and Shia Muslims; Theravadan and Mahayanan Buddhists; Roman
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and Eastern Orthodox Catholics; as well as various admixtures, such as Jews for Jesus, Confucian Catholics, and secular humanist Buddhists. Third, one large tradition not thoroughly represented in our deliberations was non-Catholic Christianity, which makes up about 40 percent of Christianity, including some vocal movements that, in America at least, are unlikely to be as friendly to the SDGs as the representatives we worked with. Fourth, another under-represented group is the NONES, those who are unaffiliated with any organized religion (“none of the above”). In North America, about 21 percent of people are now religiously unaffiliated, and more than 30 percent of the populations of many countries are NONES, including China, the Czech Republic, France, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Korea, and the United Kingdom. Fifth, in the early twenty-first century, the leadership of most religions remains male. This is changing slowly, and we succeeded in including many women’s voices in our deliberations and in this book. Nonetheless, there remain legitimate calls for long-lived religious traditions with patriarchal structures and traditions to be sensitive detectors of gender injustice and leaders in eliminating it in all forms.
This Book Ethics in Action for Sustainable Development captures the intellectual depth and diversity of this initiative by collecting the religious and ethical thought of more than thirty of its leaders. You will walk through overviews of seven major religious traditions and their conceptions of the common good. You will read about the intersection of the SDGs, ethics, and philosophy. You will be able to reflect on the consensus statements, and you will hear from practitioners on specific challenges to sustainable development. The situation is more urgent than it was in 2015 when the SDGs were adopted. The SDGs were to be achieved by 2030. We write in 2021, and at this time not one of the 193 nations that voted to adopt the SDGs is fully on track, as measured by benchmark data, to achieve the SDGs by 2030. And the world is currently beset by a major pandemic, intensifying climate disorders, and increasing inequalities. But there is good news. There is in fact wide agreement among many world religions and secular ethical traditions that the SDGs are urgent moral imperatives, in addition to being wise instrumental goals. Achieving the SDGs is a way of acknowledging our common humanity, our interdependency, and the moral and religious aims of universal human flourishing. It is our hope that the story we tell about the political, moral, and religious consensus on the SDGs will help better mobilize the ethical will to achieve them.
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his book presents an in-depth and engaged conversation among interfaith religious leaders and interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners in pursuit of an ethical consensus to ground global sustainable development efforts. Drawing on more than two years of close-knit discussions convened by Jeffrey D. Sachs and Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, it offers an extensive and inclusive vision of how to promote human flourishing. The book features a foreword by Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. “In Ethics in Action for Sustainable Development, religious leaders of many faiths and scholars of many disciplines address the ethics of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals. Their message is timely and hopeful: the world’s great religious and ethical traditions share the common commitment to end poverty, assure social justice, and achieve environmental sustainability. The world can indeed come together to build the Future We Want.” —BAN KI-MOON, former secretary-general of the United Nations “I came away from this book with a lot of new information and ideas but also a sense of relief: maybe it isn’t too late; maybe humanity and much of the other life on the planet is not irrevocably lost and without hope. Ethics in Action for Sustainable Development brings together a broad coalition of authors from disparate disciplines and shows how all of their work is connected to the pressing need to address environmental degradation.” —PHILIP J. IVANHOE, author of Oneness: East Asian Conceptions of Virtue, Happiness, and How We Are All Connected JEFFREY D. SACHS is University Professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University as well as president of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and he has been an advisor to three UN secretariesgeneral. MARCELO SÁNCHEZ SORONDO is a Catholic bishop of the Diocese of Vescovio, Italy, and former chancellor of the Pontifical Academies of Sciences and Social Sciences. OWEN FLANAGAN is James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and codirector of the Center for Comparative Philosophy at Duke University. WILLIAM VENDLEY is secretary general emeritus of Religions for Peace International and vice president and senior advisor for religion at the Fetzer Institute. ANTHONY ANNETT is a Gabelli Fellow at Fordham University and senior advisor at the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. JESSE THORSON is program manager at the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. Cover design: Julia Kushnirsky Cover painting: Eugène Delacroix, Untergehende Sonne
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