Sustainable development a must

GREED was the biggest obstacle to achieving fair societies, said Professor Jeffrey Sachs, a professor and director of the Centre for Sustainable Development at Columbia University.

Sachs said the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were “this generation’s only hope for creating peaceful, safe, fair and sustainable societies”.

“We have to make them work,” he said, but the biggest obstacle was greed.

Addressing the UN High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, which will take stock of progress on the SDGs and end on July 18, Sachs said “there is enough in the world for everyone to live free of poverty, and it won’t require a big effort on the part of big countries to help poor ones”.

But vested interests, including oil companies and the food industries, had been resisting.

Presenting league tables produced by his team and the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, he said Sweden, at the top of the list, was closest to achieving the goals and Europe was “by far” the region closest to doing so.

Moreover, the list of the top 10 countries closest to achieving the goals mirrors a complementary ranking of the world’s happiest countries.

“It is literally the truth that sustainable development is the path to happiness,” he said.

In contrast, the US is 35th on the list of countries closest to achieving the goals, and only 18th in the happiness rankings.

“Just trying to be rich does not make you happy,” he said. Sustainable

THE HAPPIEST COUNTRIES ARE THE ONES THAT TAX THEMSELVES THE MOST

development that was balanced, fair, inclusive and environmentally sustainable was what produced happiness, he added.

The happiest countries were the ones that taxed themselves the most, he added, noting that Swedes thought it was a good thing to pay half their national income to quality education and health care.

The US, on the other hand, was all about tax cuts for rich people.

“To achieve sustainable development, you have to pay for it,” he said, adding that tax cuts for the rich did not pay for sustainable development.

Appealing to everyone to mobilise resources to achieve sustainable development, he said there must be major transformation in how countries worked.

Most important was quality education, followed by universal access to health care, clean energy (“without which the planet will be wrecked”), sustainable land and food, smarter cities with decent infrastructure, and the proper use of digital technologies.

“We have to take care of ourselves. Otherwise we will destroy ourselves,” he said.