This preprint(full paper in the link below this abstract)written by Professor Jem Bendell outlines his thinking on the impact of the SDGs . It’s not comfortable reading but nor is what’s happening across the globe in terms of fires, floods and huge changes in weather events as well as the increasing evidence of polar melt -all of which say to me we are in an existential crisis.And, do those who are impacted have a voice in this crisis ?
Disasters. Preprints 2022, 2022050180 (doi: 10.20944/preprints202205.0180.v1). Bendell, J. Replacing Sustainable Development: Potential Frameworks for International Cooperation in an Era of Increasing Crises and Disasters. Preprints 2022, 2022050180 (doi: 10.20944/preprints202205.0180.v1).Copy
Abstract
This transdisciplinary review of research about international cooperation on social and environmental change builds the case for replacing Sustainable Development as the dominant framework for an era of increasing crises and disasters. The review is the output of an intentional exploration of recent studies in multiple subject areas, based on the authors’ decades of work in related fields since the Rio Earth Summit 30 years ago (rather than a keyword search of databases). It summarizes the research which documents failure to progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Consequently, the extensive scholarship critiquing the conceptual framework behind those ‘Global Goals’, and the economic ideology they arose from and support, is used to explain that failure. Although the pandemic set back the SDGs, it further revealed the inappropriate strategy behind those goals. This suggests the Global Goals constitute an ‘own-goal’ scored against people and nature. From this conclusion, alternative frameworks for organizing action on social and environmental issues become more important and are therefore briefly reviewed. It is argued that such a future framework must relate a new eco-social contract between citizen and state and engage existing organizations and capabilities that are relevant to an increasingly disrupted world. Therefore, the case is made for considering an upgraded form of Disaster Risk Management (DRM) as an overarching framework. The proposed upgrades include detaching from economic ideologies and recognizing that a wider Meta disaster from climate chaos may reduce the future availability of external support. Therefore, self-reliant resilience and locally led adaptation are identified as important to the future of DRM. Some options for professionals continuing to use the term sustainability, such as this journal, are discussed.
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