UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): What They Are & Why They're Important

so the SDGs people have heard of them maybe if you've heard of them put your hand up if you without looking at the wall can list all seventeen put your hand up I was gonna say if you could list them in order of the colors of the rainbow put your hand up or not there so we're gonna just start with sort of five or ten minutes to talk a little bit about what these things are called the SDGs obviously a lot of people have shown up today which I'm super excited about but it would be

good to have a bit of a baseline understanding so the sustainable development goals were were launched and adopted in September of 2015 by all 193 UN member states it was a process that draw two conclusion three years a fairly robust community consultation which over 8 million people discuss and frame out the issues that mattered most in their communities and on the planet they were they ended up with 17 goals but they raised three hundred issues through that community consultation process and so tucked within each of these 17 goals is actually a great deal of thought

a great deal of consultation and this really is meant to represent a best guess I guess at the issues that matter most and the things that if we were to achieve them over the next 12 years would fundamentally transform the planet who's heard of the Millennium Development Goals who worked on the Millennium Development Goals who was excited by the Millennium Development Goals to good this is not the first international framework there have been many many international frameworks that come before it so what I wanted to do is just take a moment to understand it to

share a little bit about why the SDGs are actually pretty different from the things that came before them because we know that the UN has a tendency to produce exceptional frameworks and then when we don't meet those goals you know two years in advance we start producing another exceptional framework with a longer timeline and the SDGs are actually a little bit different so again I mentioned the Millennium Development Goals these were not a set of goals that landed in any particularly significant way in Canada unless you were working within the international development sector and even

then our engagement was largely focused on kind of bilateral aid so I wanted to paint a little bit of a picture about how the Millennium Development Goals are quite different from the SDGs even though they're both three-letter acronyms sound pretty similar to one another so first and foremost the Millennium Development Goals were an agenda that focused on what we we would have called and still call in some context developing countries this was really meant to be an agenda that helped address challenges being faced by developing countries and and Canada's role was really as a bilateral

funder to help other countries develop we've learned a lot in the international development context through the years that this is really not in appropriate context and in fact that many of the issues that are being faced in developing countries are issues we experience here at home as well and so unlike the Millennium Development Goals which were really about Canada looking at other places and trying to help the SDGs are really a universal agenda they are both domestic and they are international in nature so this is really a set of goals that we need to think

about in the context of our own organizations our own communities and in the context of Canada as well as an agenda that can really help us think through our meaningful engagement with countries around the world next is the indicator coverage at the end of the day we're going to talk a little bit about data today but really I want to talk more about the kind of high-level opportunity that the SDGs present the indicator coverage of the Millennium Development Goals wasn't particularly substantive the goals weren't Universal they were focused on a specific set of eight goals

twenty-one targets and under underpinned with 60 indicators the SDGs again are a much more robust data set so it gives us actually a unique and much deeper opportunity to understand our impact as organizations as communities as a country there are 17 goals but underneath those 17 goals are a really deeply interconnected set of 169 targets and 230 indicators and what's actually most important is not the number of targets and indicators that they are but how the SDGs requires us to think about data the the slogan of the SDGs we can problematize the languages leave no

one behind but what that means from a data perspective is that in past indicators if we were to take the Millennium Development Goals and look internally or if we take the livable cities index or any of the indices around the world through rose-colored glasses Canada is often pretty high up on that list this is not a bad spot to be education is good Healthcare is good there economic opportunities etc except if you disaggregate that data and you look at subpopulations you look at people that are traditionally marginalized if you look at Canada's indigenous populations and

communities we are failing outright and abysmally and so what the SDGs requires is actually that this data doesn't pay to an aggregate picture of how Canada is doing on these 17 goals but actually requires us to look at every single sub population including those that are most traditionally and historically marginalized and if we fail to meet the goals for any one of those populations we have failed we know that if we want to get towards meeting some of these very complex challenges this isn't something that any individual organization any individual sector or group is going

to be able to accomplish it really needs to be cross-sectoral Crosse place cross definition agenda the SDGs break down silos between places I mentioned that they're universal this is a set of goals for our community for Canada and for the world it breaks down silos between definitions there are a lot of different definitions of sustainability and we could spend the whole morning and the whole day trying to figure out what it is but at a really high level this is one of the most robust definitions of sustainability insofar as it actually defines sustainability through its

environmental or ecological its economic and its social dimensions and so this is a much broader definition than we might have used historically when we think about environmental sustainability or when we use sustainability in the context of international development it breaks down silos between the issues so I talked about that data framework yes there are 17 goals but as you go down into the indicators and sub indicators you can actually see how interconnected those goals are so this isn't just about bringing together poverty reduction agencies to work better together on poverty bringing together food insecurity or

hunger focused agencies to work better on reducing food insecurity and in Canada or globally it is really about breaking down the silos between all of these issues and recognizing how interconnected they are and how interconnected our relationship with land nature and ecology is with our relationship to the place that we live in cities and communities this is an agenda that actually requires policy coherence and interdepartmental participation Communications Canada based in Ottawa I don't live there but this is actually a major challenge for the federal government right because it requires one hand to know what the

other is doing it requires then what with that when one policy is formulated it isn't obstructing another policy and it isn't obstructing our collective ability to work as a country forward towards advancing these goals it is cross-sectoral the SDGs again were built with all sectors in mind and while I would love to say that civil society was at the heart of that and that we really were driving the agenda from day one in September of 2015 actually the private sector was some of the first organizations globally to sign on to this agenda and there are

large multilateral organizations that recognize that this is the future that we need that are actually not only thinking about their CSR activities but fundamentally rethinking about how they're running their business so that they are producing less of the negative externalities that they might have produced in in past years and lastly it's an attempt at breaking down silos between people again we talked a little bit about the leave no one behind adage this is really an agenda that was built through participation and community consultation at a scale that the UN had never undertaken before this was

driven by community and it really requires the participation of everybody if we're actually going to get towards meeting these goals by 2030 really simply put the SDGs are a shared language or at least a best attempt at a shared language and well that's a pretty simple statement it's actually pretty transformative when you think about what it means for our ability to work again across geographies how we can start to share knowledge share information in a reliable and a data-driven way with organizations that might be like ours but that are operating in a different part of

the world or how we can actually think about the issues that are we're facing in our communities with a common language that might be spoken by government I've been spending years trying to figure out government speak I haven't gotten there yet so there might actually be a shared language there or or to connect with the private sector recently a guy named Arthur bull came up to me he runs the rural Nova Scotia's Community Foundation and he said JP we're all about the SDGs in rural Nova Scotia and I said why that kind of shocked and

surprised to me at this early stage in the game and he said we've been fighting a battle to protect oceans and fisheries for three decades and nobody's been listening and we for the first time have an opportunity to speak the same language as others in our community about the importance of protecting oceans and of course it's it's it's an attempt at a shared measurement system we don't all have to pivot and measure to the SDGs but we can triangulate using the SDGs and so very quickly we can understand how one organizations work compares to another

and build a picture that is cohesive enough to really get to the root of where the gaps are as we think about this 12-year journey we're gonna be on connected to the SDGs so that brings us to the question of how Canada is doing guesses thumbs down thumbs down Haley you know so yeah thumbs down there's a lot of different indices that show how Canada is doing and again I think as we're really jumping into this space there's gonna be even more data available this was a chart I like it because it's very simple it

was produced by the sustainable development Solutions Network who recently launched their Canadian division at the University of Waterloo to help connect organizations across sectors but particularly to bring the the robust value of academia into this conversation about the sustainable development goals and really quickly if you've if you've ever seen or stopped at a stoplight this is pretty much how it works there are three places generally speaking in which Canada is is meeting or is likely to meet its requirements within the current system under the SDGs yellow we've got some work to do and red we

are failing quite a bit Mele at this point in time and there's a lot of reasons for this just a couple of statistics that speak to some of these yellows and these red areas in 2015 almost 5 million Canadians or one in seven people lived in poverty this included over 1 million children in 2014 women reported 1.2 million violent incidences including physical assault sexual assault and robbery as of the 31st of October in 2017 there were at least a hundred drinking water advisories in First Nations communities that had been in place from over a year

between 1990 and 2015 Canada's greenhouse gas emissions have been on the rise and there's this is you know five data points four data points of many many more that really underpin the colors that were up on that board so we actually have work to do and that work again starts with our own organizations how we work with one another and how we think about the future of London the Auditor General in in April of this year put out its first report monitoring the federal government not Canada's uniform progress but the federal government's progress towards meeting

its commitments under the SDGs about two two-and-a-half years in and it was you know I know that the red and the green are equal but it was a pretty scathing report some of the very high-level observations of this report were that the federal government had a narrow interpretation of sustainable development there was not yet a federal governance structure there was limited national consultation and engagement no national implementation plans and few locally articulated targets there was no system to measure monitor and report on national targets and there was an incomplete analysis of the policies and programs

that were already in place two-and-a-half years into this agenda so we're we're kind of late to the game at least with respect to how the federal government has been thinking about the SDGs with that said Statistics Canada has actually been a bit of a diamond in the rough in the context of the global picture because stat scan has actually played a really fundamental role in shaping the goals and helping to articulate them and actually working with other countries around the world to help them build their national strategies without having a mandate to do this on

their own they've built a a data framework or developed a data framework there was a data portal in progress that data portal in its beta format is now live so stat scan is making visible data that hasn't been made visible before and there are specific examples of a programs at scale that are being developed and implemented by the federal government that are actually helping us make progress towards some of the areas and where there are gaps in which there are gaps in Canada but much more needs to be done but there's some good news there's

a silver lining here and that's we're starting to catch up Canada was late to the game those that have been doing the SDG work since 2013 I've kind of been recognizing the fact that Canada really was largely absent from a lot of the conversations but a lot of really exciting things are starting to take place this is just a few of them in about a month's time Canada will for the first time voluntarily report to the UN on its own progress the federal government will be bringing a delegation to the high-level political forum in New

York and will release the first voluntary national review and it is committed to doing this again so we're going to actually get a perspective from the federal government about how Canada is doing and I know that they are working as well to provide disaggregate pictures as I think looking at 36 communities right now across the country where there they're actively kind of diving deep on local level data against a scan has launched a beta of its data portal I know that they have intentions to build it out in substantive ways and so when we think

about the future probe vital signs or we think about mapping our own organizations work and data to the national picture more and more data is going to be made available and transparent budget 2018 actually articulated a vision for Canada's progress towards the SDGs for the first time part of that was a 50 million dollar allocation over 12 years to Statistics Canada to really make sure that we're doing the data piece well and that that data is accessible and available and there's a lot of data that Canada actually isn't collecting yet so entirely new systems need

to be developed to make sure that we can track our progress and it also a very modest allocation of 70 million across departments to develop programs to work towards these goals so and there's multiple pages in budget 2018 that are worth reading that that are a positive sign and actually the most important thing is all of this talk about the government being late to the game has spurred other sectors and other organizations to just say why are we waiting like why are we sitting here waiting let's just start doing and so there's been this emergence

of some really incredible you know cross sector networks taking a national picture national look at Canada and really activating their communities their constituents their sectors around the SDGs this is just a couple of them SDS n Canada launched in Waterloo sustainable development Solutions Network Alliance 2030 which is actually a collaboration between hundreds of organizations across the country including community foundations UN Global Compact really thinking about meaningful ways to engage the private sector in this space the Waterloo global science initiative I'm gonna leave Julie to share the punchline to some of the exciting work that they're

doing right now to bring people together across the country and really plan how we're going to work together better six which is a global social innovation network is actually founding six Canada to really think about the direct implications of social innovation on the SDGs and this is just a an early example of some national networks and the most exciting part about these networks is that they're actually talking to each other a lot we're all hanging out all the time and there's a lot of synergy that's being fostered between these sectors and these networks so lots

to be excited about stats can again is real now especially since the Auditor General's report has come out to make sure that they can collect the data that's that we need to collect so this is just a really quick look at the the totality of the number of indicators under each goal and then obviously the filled in part of the bars represent the indicators that Canada can actually measure right now one of the most substantive gaps is actually in understanding our environmental and ecological impact and so I know that there's been robust conversations between stat

scan environment in climate change Canada and others to figure out how we can actually collect and share and make visible this important data the most important thing is that individual organizations are talking about this we didn't know that in June of 2017 we started a national conversation on Canada and the SDGs and just went from community to community to ask a really simple question have you heard of these things and are you thinking about them and we were actually pretty shocked and surprised by by what we heard 89% of our participants had agreed that the

SDGs was a useful framework for their work this was a cross sector group two-fifths were already starting to think about how to align their data to the SDGs and this was going back a year so individual local organizations had this on their radar one of the things we heard across all of our sessions was we were thinking about it we didn't realize you were thinking about it huh and wouldn't it be great if there was a central space to continue this conversation and so that's really where some of these national networks are starting to play

a role and the momentum is building and so that's really why we're here today there's been a lot of great conversations at a national level there have been individual organizations that have been thinking about the context of the SDGs in relation to their own work there are new national networks forming and there's a federal government now that is stepping up and starting to run more quickly than it has and so now we really want to think today about what does this mean for London what does this mean for our own organisations and how we work

together to really help continue to build on this momentum to localize it and to get to 2030 and possibly not see the next massive agenda that articulates all these things we fail to meet in the next 12 years