Professor Sachs Stresses that the Sustainable Development Goals Represent the “Attention Part of our Global Brain”

On Thursday April 30, GFDD attended a presentation of the latest publication by Professor Jeffrey Sachs entitled The Age of Sustainable Development at United Nations Headquarters in New York. The author was joined by Mr. Maher Nasser, Director of the Outreach Division in the United Nations Department of Public Information and H.E. Ambassador Donoghue of the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Ireland and co-facilitator of the Post 2015 Intergovernmental Negotiations who both praised Professor Sachs for putting forward a practical framework for sustainable development over the next 15 years.

Several hundred attendees, made up of NGO representatives and Member State delegates, turned up for the occasion to hear Professor Sachs’ remarks. The professor drew parallels between non linearity in our economies
(such as the 2008 economic recession), non-linearity in our climate (i.e. the melting of permafrost releasing ball of Co2 and pushing up emissions) and non-linearity in society (event suchs as the 1994 Rwandan genocide), to highlight the fact that “minor changes can trigger huge reactions thereby underscoring the importance of sustainable development”. With that in mind he highlighted the work being done at the United Nations to put together a list of Sustainable Development Goals that “represent the attention part of our global brain” and highlights the interconnections between the social, economic and environmental development that need to be addressed in the successor framework to the Millennium Development Goals in the period 2015
to 2030.

In
this new publication, Professor Sachs presents a compelling and practical framework for how global citizens can use a holistic way forward to address the seemingly intractable worldwide problems of persistent extreme poverty, environmental degradation, and political-economic injustice: sustainable development.

Ambassador Donoghue, who also co-facilitates the Post 2015 Intergovernmental Negotiations of the United Nations development agenda, praised Professor
Sachs’ book as a “call to action to his peers, business leaders and citizens alike, as well as the 193 member states of the UN currently negotiating our next development agenda”.

About Professor Jeffrey Sachs
Jeffrey D. Sachs is the Director of The Earth Institute, Professor of Sustainable Development, and Professor of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University. He is Special Advisor to United Nations
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on the Millennium Development Goals, having held the same position under former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. He is Director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He is co-founder and Chief Strategist of Millennium Promise Alliance, and is director of the Millennium Villages Project. Sachs is also one of the Secretary-General’s MDG Advocates, and a Commissioner of the ITU/UNESCO Broadband Commission for Development. He has authored
three New York Times bestsellers in the past seven years: The End of Poverty (2005), Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (2008), and The Price of Civilization (2011). His most recent books are To Move the World: JFK’s Quest for Peace (2013) and The Age of Sustainable Development (2015).

Related Links:
https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-age-of-sustainable-development/9780231173155