ENGT5115 | Development | Role of Energy in the Sustainable Development

Energy in Sustainable Development Goals

Adopted by all the Members States of the United Nations, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable development in 2013 is a blueprint for shared peace and prosperity for all of humanity at present and throughout the future. The UN has developed 17 Sustainable Development Goals of SDGs. which has been explained as an urgent call for action by all the member nations of the UN both developed and developing (Schwerhoff and Sy, 2017). It is a global partnership that recognizes need to end poverty. And ending poverty requires a hand in hand approach of developing strategies for improving education, healthcare, racial inequality, and spur growth of developing nations. And all of these strategies have to formulate while keeping climate change in mind.

These SDGs develop on the basis of years of work by both the member states of the UN and the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

• At the Earth Summit of June 1992 which was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the Agenda 21, which was a comprehensive plan of building a global partnership of developing sustainably by improving human life and protecting the environment, was adopted by more than 178 countries.
• At the Millenium summit of September 2000 held at the UN headquarters in New York the Millennium declaration was unanimously adopted by all the member nations (Giupponi and Gain, 2017). The Summit elaborated eight Goals of Millennium Development on reducing extreme poverty by the year 2015.
• Adopted at the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in South Africa, The Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable development was a plan of implementation that reaffirmed the commitments of the global community to eradicate poverty and protect the environment. The declaration was built o the Millennium Declaration and te Agenda 21 and included more involvement of partnerships that were multilateral.
• "The Future We Want" was an outcome document that was adopted by the member states at the Rio+20( United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development) held in Rio de Janeiro in June 2012 (Renzaho, Kamara and Toole, 2017). The member nations decided on an inter alliance for launching a process to develop a set of sustainable development goals that would be built upon the millennium development goals and to further establish the UN High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development. Other measure that were to be taken for the implementation of sustainable development including mandates regarding the programmes of the future for the development of finance in oher developing states were also the outcome of Rio+20. 
• A 30 member Open Working Group was set up at the 2013 General Assembly for developing a proposal on the sustainable development goals or SDGs.
• 2015 saw the adoption of a number of major agreements and can be considered as a landmark year for International Policy Shaping and Multilateralism (Stafford-Smith, et al. 2017). These included the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (March 2015), Addis Ababa Action Agenda on Financing for Development (July 2015), Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development with 17 SDGs that were adopted at the New York UN Sustainable Development Summit in September 2015, and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change (December 2015)
• The Annual High-level Forum on Sustainable Development now serves as UNs central platform for the reviewing and Follow ups that arrive as a result of the SDGs

The Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the UN has a division for Sustainable development goals. This division is the acting Secretariat for the SDGs. it provides a substantial amount of support and a building capacity for the thematic issues of the goals (Haines, et al. 2017). These issues include energy, water, oceans, climate, transport, urbanization. Science and technology, the Global Sustainable Development report and the Small Island Developing Report, the DSDG has a key role in evaluating the system wide implementation and advocacy of the 2030 Agenda and the activities of outreaching that are related to the SDGs. 

Out of the 17 sustainable development goals the SDG 7 is a stand alone goal that is dedicated to providing clean. Safe and efficient energy to the whole world. Due to the recent progress in the field of electrification the goal of ensuring reliable, modern and affordable energy has a few steps closer to success (Singla, Ahuja and Sethi, 2017). In particular the developments of local distribution companies or LDCs and efficient energy consumption in the industries have contributed to this success. However there is a need to strengthen national priorities and ambitions on policy making to ensure that the world s on the right track towards meeting the energy needs by the year 2030. The aim of SDG 7 is to provide and ensure that the whole world have access to reliable affordable and sustainable modern energy (Kumar, 2017). Increasing the diversity of the market and increasing the renewable energy share into the mix of global energy have been identified as the primary objective of this goal. Achieving this objective will help stakeholders and common citizens to bear the expense of switching to renewable and clean energy which will in turn help create an incentive to achieve the other targets which fall under the same goal like doubling the efficiency improvement rate, the enhancement of cooperation at an international level that will help in facilitating the access of research in renewable energy technology thus improving efficiency in advance fuel technology and the promotion of advantages of investing in the energy infrastructure (Munro, Van der Horst and Healy, 2017). The current rate of climate change is drastic and it is the best interests of the nations to find and implement clean and renewable forms of energy so as to protect the health of the immediate generations and the generations to come.

Progress In this area has has fallen short of what was needed to to achieve accessible energy for the entire world and to find renewable sources of energy that would increase energy efficiency. Meaningful and substantial improvements in this sector requires higher amount of financing and a bolder approach toward policy making (Reyers, 2017.). There is also a need for improvement in the willingness of the countries to accept and embrace these new improvements in technology on a larger scale. The process is tedious as the current energy companies will not be willing to let go of their business and embrace new and renewable technologies but they need to understand that there profit margins will decline significantly if there is no population left to cosme there products.

Nations need to show the willingness to nationalise the available natural resources as conglomerating them will only lead to imbalance and thus become a primary roadblock in theway of achieving SDG 7 (Stenberg et al. 2017). Though there have been some positive approaches by the world's largest energy consuming nations there ratio of progress and underdevelopment remains significantly lopsided in favour of the later. The efficiency needs to be doubled by 2030 to achieve SDG 7 and provide the current and future generations with sustainable environment to enhance the current civilisation and not fall into devastation.

Conclusion

Sustainable development can be defined as the development of humanity while simultaneously conserving that natural resources that aid this development for future generations. In recent times human civilization has reached a point of great severity were sustainable development is no longer a choice but a necessity in order to ensure that human civilisation lasts for a few more centuries. Radical change in climate, extreme poverty and the exhaustion of natural resource upon which the whole human civilisation is based on has put mankind on the brink of extinction (Kurian, 2017). Thus as a radical step towards changing the current predicament the United nation a put forth a set of 17 goals which are included in the Agenda 30. They are set of step by step goals with the ultimate objective of developing a sustainable future for mankind. Among these 17 goals SDG 7 dels directly and primarily with the energy crisis of the word and encourages the member nation of theUN to switch to renewable sources of energy and conserve the ecosystem.

References

Giupponi, C. and Gain, A.K., 2017. Integrated spatial assessment of the water, energy and food dimensions of the sustainable development goals. Regional Environmental Change, 17(7), pp.1881-1893.

Haines, A., Amann, M., Borgford-Parnell, N., Leonard, S., Kuylenstierna, J. and Shindell, D., 2017. Short-lived climate pollutant mitigation and the Sustainable Development Goals. Nature climate change, 7(12), p.863.

Kumar, A., Sah, B., Singh, A.R., Deng, Y., He, X., Kumar, P. and Bansal, R.C., 2017. A review of multi criteria decision making (MCDM) towards sustainable renewable energy development. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 69, pp.596-609.

Kurian, M., 2017. The water-energy-food nexus: trade-offs, thresholds and transdisciplinary approaches to sustainable development. Environmental Science & Policy, 68, pp.97-106.

Munro, P., van der Horst, G. and Healy, S., 2017. Energy justice for all? Rethinking sustainable development goal 7 through struggles over traditional energy practices in Sierra Leone. Energy Policy, 105, pp.635-641.

Nerini, F.F., Tomei, J., To, L.S., Bisaga, I., Parikh, P., Black, M., Borrion, A., Spataru, C., Broto, V.C., Anandarajah, G. and Milligan, B., 2018. Mapping synergies and trade-offs between energy and the Sustainable Development Goals. Nature Energy, 3(1), p.10.

Renzaho, A.M., Kamara, J.K. and Toole, M., 2017. Biofuel production and its impact on food security in low and middle income countries: Implications for the post-2015 sustainable development goals. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 78, pp.503-516.

Reyers, B., Stafford-Smith, M., Erb, K.H., Scholes, R.J. and Selomane, O., 2017. Essential variables help to focus sustainable development goals monitoring. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 26, pp.97-105.

Schwerhoff, G. and Sy, M., 2017. Financing renewable energy in Africa–Key challenge of the sustainable development goals. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 75, pp.393-401.

Singla, A., Ahuja, I.P.S. and Sethi, A.P.S., 2017. The effects of demand pull strategies on sustainable development in manufacturing industries. International Journal of Innovations in Engineering and Technology, 8(2), pp.27-34.

Stafford-Smith, M., Griggs, D., Gaffney, O., Ullah, F., Reyers, B., Kanie, N., Stigson, B., Shrivastava, P., Leach, M. and O’Connell, D., 2017. Integration: the key to implementing the Sustainable Development Goals. Sustainability Science, 12(6), pp.911-919.

Stenberg, K., Hanssen, O., Edejer, T.T.T., Bertram, M., Brindley, C., Meshreky, A., Rosen, J.E., Stover, J., Verboom, P., Sanders, R. and Soucat, A., 2017. Financing transformative health systems towards achievement of the health Sustainable Development Goals: a model for projected resource needs in 67 low-income and middle-income countries. The Lancet Global Health, 5(9), pp.e875-e887.

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