The main challenges to sustainable development which are global in character include poverty and exclusion, unemployment, climate change, conflict and humanitarian aid, building peaceful and inclusive societies, building strong institutions of governance, and supporting the rule of law.
Sustainable Development Goals (UNGA, 2015):
1. Ending all category of poverty everywhere;
2. Ending hunger, ensuring food security and nutrition, and promoting sustainable agriculture;
3. Ensuring healthy and sound lives and promote wellbeing promotion of all at all ages;
4. Ensuring quality education inclusively and equitably and creating learning opportunities for round the life;
5. Empowering all women and girls and achieving gender equality;
6. Available and sustainable water and sanitation management to be ensured for all;
7. Affordable, sustainable, reliable, and modern energy to be ensured for all;
8. Ensuring inclusive, sustained, and reliable economic growth, full and inclusive employment provide decent work for all;
9. Building resilient infrastructure, foster innovation and promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization;
10. Minimizing income inequality within and among countries;
11. Cities and human settlement to be made inclusive, resilient, safe, and sustainable;
12. Ensuring sustainable production and consumption patterns;
13. Combat with climate change adaptation and its impacts ;
14. Conserve the seas, oceans and marine resources for sustainable development;
15. Restore, protect, and ensure terrestrial ecosystems with sustainability, combat desertification, manage forests, and reverse land degradation and loss of biodiversity;
16. Promotion of inclusive and peaceful societies for attaining sustainable development, accessibility of justice by all, and building accountable, inclusive and effective institutions at all levels;
17. Strengthening implementation means and revitalizing the global partnership to ensure sustainable development.
The Main Challenges of Sustainable Development
1. Lack of financial resources to carry out and plan sustainable development.
2. Sustainable development is often not possible in war-torn countries as there are other priorities on hand.
3. Natural occurrences, such as earthquakes and tsunamis, can pose a threat to sustainability as they can shift the flow of water and destroy certain elements of infrastructure. (In the village of Ramche in Nepal, the only source of water was shaken off course by the earthquake of 2015 and as a result of the difficulty of access to the village, it has been undergoing a water crisis. Expenditure on bottled water in the village has in turn grown and in many other areas in Nepal undergoing a water crisis, people resort to drinking and cooking with E-Coli infected water as an act of desperation. Meanwhile tsunamis in Southeast and East Asia may pose a threat to the already existing sustainable infrastructure, such as the destruction of means of public transport in Japan.)
4. The governmental conflict between immediate profit and investment towards sustainable technologies. (In Poland, the government has even increased financing towards the mining sector instead of moving full steam ahead towards adopting sustainable energy sources, with coal amounting towards 80% of total energy generation in Poland. These measures are thought to have been implemented as a move to win miners’ votes in the south of Poland.)
5. Corruption. (Funding to developing countries is usually provided through foreign grants, in the case of Nepal foreign grants constitute the majority coming from the UK. Nevertheless, due to bureaucracy and corruption in Nepal, in order to pass certain development projects a stipend needs to be paid to ministers as well as service fees to the Nepal government which significantly slow down NGO processes.)
6. Lack of efforts at a municipal level.
Sources:
1. International Young Naturefriends
