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Tackling global challenges: Embracing the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
Tackling global challenges: Embracing the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals In 2015, world leaders adopted an Agenda for tackling the most pressing issues for sustainable development, setting out 17 goals to be achieved by 2030. As a global university, Imperial College London has embraced the Agenda and is working hard to help meet those goals.
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t’s intriguing to consider how 17 was settled upon as the number of United Nations Sustainable Development Goals to be achieved by 2030. As numbers go, it’s not an obvious candidate for a countdown, but then it’s unlikely the goals were conceived with a set figure in mind. And even more
unlikely is the idea that there was any intention for them to be ticked off the list one by one. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are highly interconnected and were conceived as a collective plan to navigate a sustainable future for the next generations through collaboration
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and cooperation. The seventeenth goal around partnership is not an afterthought, but the bedrock on which the others are to be achieved. As an institution with collaboration running through its veins – and one with over 16,000 of the next generation studying within its student community – the
philosophy behind the SDGs chimes instinctively with Imperial’s ethos. Through direct initiatives such as the Global Development Hub, and a plethora of activities and innovations embedded within its ecosystem, Imperial has all of the 17 SDGs – and the interconnections between them – well within its sights.
The role of science
Science is central to the Sustainable Development Agenda. Research can provide an evidence-base for its implementation, a means to evaluate its progress and a platform from which to develop innovative solutions. Interdisciplinary research is particularly important, not
Issue 4 / 2021–22
