UN’s Sustainable Development Goals – what do they mean for us?

In a world where the media paint a picture of war, refugees and environmental and climate disasters, there can be good reason to point out that there is actually justified hope for a better world. The UN has agreed on 17 global Sustainable Development Goals that also require Danish action. For us in AGRO this will have consequences for the direction of our research – in both a Danish and international context.

On the global level, some of the bigger goals deal with eradicating poverty and hunger and ensuring health, education and proper working conditions for everyone regardless of sex and background. Some goals also concern reducing inequality in societies, providing access to clean energy, fighting climate changes and pollution, and ensuring biodiversity.  

These are to a great extent interconnected and therefore one of the sustainable development goals is about partnerships. The goals can only be attained through global cooperation. In this regard, the latest tendencies towards a greater focus on national interests is worrisome. Achieving the goals for a better world can only be reached by binding cooperation where the parties can rightfully place demands on each other. For us in AGRO this means we must participate in international research collaborations but also that we must ramp up our collaboration with businesses, the agricultural sector and the authorities. 

Food security requires cooperation

Interaction between the various goals and the global perspectives can be demonstrated by the sustainable development goal regarding eradicating hunger, achieving food security, ensuring better nutrition and improving agriculture’s sustainability. This issue dates back to 1798 when Thomas Malthus articulated the connection between population growth, disease and hunger. His view was that any kind of growth in food production would be balanced out by population growth until hunger and disease once again could create a balance between births and deaths.   

Malthus was not right. Technological developments have managed to increase food production to a level where no one any longer needs to go hungry because there is not enough food. Medicine has solved most problems regarding infectious diseases and is well on its way in many other areas. Education and general economic growth in many countries has contributed to reducing birth rates. 

However, not all the problems have been solved. The world population as a whole does not have food security and sustainable production methods are not used to supply the food. There are still 800 million people who do not receive sufficient nutrition, mainly due to poverty and lack of distribution. In addition, the population will grow by two billion people by 2050. 

The resources must be used in a better way

On the other hand, many people in developed and developing countries have a too high or unbalanced diet and huge amounts of good food products are wasted. Much of modern agriculture uses resources wrongly or too intensively. This leads to depletion of the soil and water and, in many cases, to also to pollution of the environment. We must therefore reevaluate how food is produced, distributed and consumed. 

In order to avoid hunger and malnutrition in the future, the solutions must be based on a variety of living conditions around the world. A prerequisite must be that enough food with the right nutritional composition is produced and that it is produced under sound conditions with regard to the climate and environment. This is a huge challenge on the global level and is an area in which the knowledge and expertise that AGRO’s staff have can contribute significantly. 

I would like to encourage everyone to make themselves familiar with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. They will definitely play a role in the future prioritisation of research in Denmark and the rest of the world in the future. If we as a global society succeed with regard to these sustainable development goals then the future actually looks much brighter. 

You can see UN's Sustainable Development Goals here.