United Nations Sustainable Development Summit 2015

United Nations Sustainable Development Summit 2015
25 – 27 September 2015, New York
SUMMIT WEBSITE

The United Nations summit for the adoption of the post-2015 development agenda will be held from 25 to 27 September 2015, in New York and convened as a high-level plenary meeting of the General Assembly.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also called Global Goals, are a proposed set of targets relating to future international development. They are to replace the Millennium Development Goals once those expire at the end of 2015. The SDGs were first formally discussed at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development held in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012 (Rio+20).

On 19 July 2014, the UN General Assembly’s Open Working Group on Sustainable Development Goals (OWG) forwarded a proposal for the SDGs to the Assembly. The proposal contained 17 goals with 169 targets covering a broad range of sustainable development issues. These included ending poverty and hunger, improving health and education, making cities more sustainable, combating climate change, and protecting oceans and forests.

On 4 December 2014, the UN General Assembly accepted the Secretary-General’s Synthesis Report which stated that the agenda for the post-2015 SDG process would be based on the OWG proposals.

The Intergovernmental Negotiations on the Post 2015 Development Agenda (IGN) began in January 2015 and ended in August 2015. Following the negotiations, a final document was adopted at the UN Sustainable Development Summit September 25th-27th, 2015 in New York, USA.

The Sustainable Development 2015 website provides the latest news, information and expert analysis around the global decision-making process to define a new set of global goals to eradicate poverty through sustainable development, known as the post-2015 development agenda. SDG2015

The title of the agenda is Transforming our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

…when world leaders meet at the United Nations, you’re going to hear a lot of good news about usually bad things — like global poverty and malaria.

These are some of the favourite topics at the UN, and at the General Assembly this week, there will be a lot of buzz about how much better we’ve gotten at dealing with them. In 15 years, malaria deaths have dropped by more than 60 percent. The number of people living in “extreme poverty” has been reduced by more than half. (A lot of them live in China, where population is so huge that it skews the global poverty numbers, but still.)

Cutting malaria deaths and reducing global poverty were two of the eight “Millennium Development Goals” — a pie-in-the-sky vision from the General Assembly meeting in 2000 to focus on making 7 key terrible things better in just 15 years.

A World Health Organization review of the goals basically says this: We did a good job on some of them, like reducing the number of HIV cases or the number of kids who die before their fifth birthday. Other ones, like making sure women don’t die in childbirth, we weren’t so great at.

But our time is up: The Millennium Development Goals were a 15-year project, and they expire this month.

The point is, overall, things are getting better — but the work isn’t over yet.

Enter an even bigger United Nations idea: the Sustainable Development Goals.