Sustainable Development Goals – Are There too Many?

For three decades, climate campaigners have fought to make fossil fuels so expensive that people would be forced to abandon them. Their dream is becoming reality: Energy prices are spiraling out of control and will soon get even worse. Yet we are no closer to solving climate change.

Promoting his climate change film An Inconvenient Sequel, former US vice-president Al Gore likes to say that the nightly news has become “a nature hike through the Book of Revelations”.

He’s not the only one touting an apocalypse. In a much-shared story, New York magazine warned that famine, economic collapse and “a sun that cooks us” will happen as soon as the end of this century, as “parts of the Earth will likely become uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable”.

The UN has promised to achieve universal education since 1950, and currently contemplates this target for its 2015-30 development goals again.

But with 60 million children still out of school, the international community should not simply postpone the same universal-education target until 2030. Instead, it is time to abandon this unrealistic goal in favor of an achievable, targeted, and cost-effective approach.