A New Agenda for Sustainability
Editorial of Marie-Laure Salles, Director of the Geneva Graduate Institute, for the Geneva Policy Outlook 2025
On September 25, 2015, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Objectives. The Preamble of that text was very clear: “There can be no sustainable development without peace and no peace without sustainable development”. Sustainability has since then become inscribed at the heart of multilateralism, and has found its way to the public and private sectors in many parts of the world. The notion, however, has remained broad and vague enough to leave a fair amount of room for interpretation and, as a consequence, for possible procrastination, if not avoidance.
Grappling with an Era of Radical Uncertainty
Since 2015, we have seen an intensification and acceleration of the many challenges humanity faces, and we have had to acknowledge our relative failure to tackle them. We are contending with interconnected crises – climate, destruction of biodiversity, extreme inequalities, disinformation and cyberwars, pandemics, wars including the return of the nuclear risk, and technological threats. The reinforcing dynamics between those crises generate the kind of radical uncertainty that characterises our age. Those many challenges potentially have an existential impact, each in itself let alone in combination. Even if they are not questioning our species’ survival, they could lead to a profound redefinition of what it means to be human.
In parallel, we must acknowledge that we are falling short when it comes to the solutions and to the promises associated with the 2016 Paris Agreement and Agenda 2030. Various reports show that staying within the +1.5° or even the +2° Celsius range set by the Paris Agreement is becoming increasingly less likely. We know from the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that a +2° Celsius increase will bring along major environmental disruptions with irrefutably dramatic consequences. At the same time, the United Nations confirms that we are on track to achieve at most 17% of the sustainable development objectives that we collectively set for ourselves in 2015.
Read the whole editorial on the Geneva Policy Outlook website
