There are many sustainable development challenges that the world faces in improving the lives of all its people within the planetary boundaries. These include several environmental, economic, and social challenges as outlined below.
Pollution is one of the biggest and most serious problems facing humanity and all other life forms on the earth. It is defined as the wrongful contamination of the atmosphere, water or soil to the extent that normal environmental processes are adversely affected. Pollutants can be present on the environment due to naturally occurring phenomena, but they are considered contaminants when they are released in excess of natural levels.
Every ecosystem is susceptible to suffer from multiple forms of contamination. Pollution often take the form of chemical substances and waste freed to the land, air and water. It comes from a wide range of sources and activities, including industrial processes, farming, human waste and many others that alter natural landscapes sometimes irreversibly. All of this leads to significant threats to natural ecosystems and human life itself.
Pollution is a worldwide problem but affects more to those who have less resources to manage properly their waste and who often suffer the externalities caused by third party activities. The excess of exposure to contaminants has an impact on every aspect of life, ranging from hazard situations to dramatic reduction of life quality and people’s lifespan itself. Therefore, address the excess of contaminants is a key challenge to guarantee equal access to opportunities in every region of the world.
The rapid increase of human impact in the last decades, has boosted serious problems of depletion of natural resources, degradation of major ecosystems and it threatens the biodiversity worldwide. We are immersed in an unsustainable model of development that has been present in the western world for decades and it’s now being adopted by developing countries, but ironically this growth model threatens human developments itself.
Nature’s products support multiple industries and human activities such as agriculture, pharmaceuticals, construction, tourism… The loss of biodiversity put on risk our food supplies, sources of medicines and energy, but not only that, it also interferes with essential ecological functions, menacing the very ability of nature to recover. This will lead to accelerated ecological degeneration, reduction of economic opportunities and increase of social problems.
The latest trends show an alarming decline of Earth’s nature life-support systems. According to the UN global assessment report, nature is being destroyed at a rate ten to hundreds of times higher that the average over the past 10 million years. The biomass of wild mammals has fallen by 82%, natural ecosystems have lost about half their area and million species are at risk of extinction, including insects which are crucial to plant pollination. All this is happening largely as a result of human actions and it is related with population growth along with inequality. Individuals in the developed world have four times as much of an economic footprint as those in the poorest countries.
(Source: https://www.un.org/en/events/biodiversityday/background.shtml ; https://www.iucn.org/resources/issues-briefs/deforestation-and-forest-degradation) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/06/human-society-under-urgent-threat-loss-earth-natural-life-un-report
Water is the core of sustainable development and is critical for socio-economic development, energy and food production, healthy ecosystems and for human survival itself. Water is also critical in the adaptation to climate change and it is closely related to conflicts. There is an increasingly need to better manage the quantity and quality for the sustainable stewardship of the surface and ground water resource base as well as effectively deliver services based on this resource (e.g. for water supply, agriculture, hydropower, navigation, etc.).
However, increasing access is not enough. Water security is among the top global risks in terms of likelihood of occurrence and development impact. This is defined as the capacity of a population to safeguard sustainable access to adequate quantities of acceptable quality water for sustaining livelihoods, human wellbeing, and socio-economic development, for ensuring protection against waterborne pollution and water-related disasters, and for preserving ecosystems in a climate of peace and political stability. This is an integral part to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), without improving management of water resources it will not be possible to achieve many challenges of the 21st century.
Climate can be defined as the “average weather” in a particular place over a period ranging from months to thousands or millions of years. The Earth’s climate system includes the land surface, atmosphere, oceans and ice. A constant, predictable weather in the short term or climatic stable conditions in the long term, are essential conditions for the economies to grow.
Climate variability are shorter-term fluctuations or seasonal on multi-seasonal time scales. These changes or fluctuations around the average can be caused by many reasons, such as El Niño Southern Oscillation phenomenon near the equatorial Pacific Ocean, but they alone do not cause the long-term average itself to change. However, these oscillations can cause natural hazards that become disasters when people’s lives, and livelihoods are destroyed. Human and material losses caused by such disasters are a major obstacle to sustainable development.
Climate change are alterations in the Earth’s climate systems over much longer periods, decades to millennia. It can be caused by natural processes such as volcanic activity, solar variability, plate tectonics or shifts in the Earth’s orbit, but usually when talking about Climate Change we are referring to changes attributable to human activity, such as increased greenhouse gas emissions. The globally averaged combined land and ocean surface temperature data show a warming of 0.85°C (0.65°C to 1.06°C) or 1.53 Fahrenheit over the period 1880 to 2012 according to the Fifth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on climate Change.
Source: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/climate-change/ and https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/climatechange/overview
Oceans cover 71% of the Earth’s surface and they contain 97% of the water on Earth. Oceans also contain 99% of the living space on the planet by volume, because life is found all the way from the surface to the bottom of the deepest part. Seas and oceans along with coastal lines, are home of large aquatic ecosystems, including salt marshes, seagrass meadows, mangroves, rocky intertidal systems and coral reefs. Outwards from the coast we find offshore systems such as the deep-sea ecosystems. Oceans contain nearly 200,000 identified species, but actual numbers are unknown.
All these ecosystems are threatened by many factors as marine pollution, invasive species, overfishing and global warming. As global temperatures increase, the ocean responds by expanding. Changing sea level swill affect everyone on our planet and currently the oceans are rising at the rate of 0.13 inches per year. Oceans are fundamental to mitigate climate change, but human activity has taken a toll on their health. They absorb about 30% of the extra CO2 from fossil fuels, in turn this is causing ocean acidification which threatens the balance and productivity of the oceans.
The oceans play also a significant role on the economy. Healthy oceans, coasts and freshwater ecosystems are crucial for economic growth and food production. The concept of “blue economy” refers to the range of economic sectors and related policies that together Blue economy is sustainable use of ocean resources for economic growth improved livelihoods and jobs, and ocean ecosystem health.
Agriculture is the process of producing food and other related products by the cultivation of plants and the raising of livestock. The different agricultural sectors include crops, livestock, forestry and fisheries. Food and agricultural systems are fundamental for human life. Not only because they provide the energy and nutrition that people need to live, but also, they provide an income source for billions of people, many of whom are poor. Agriculture is also the largest user of the world’s natural resources. The main challenge is to bring to the world a food system that can feed every person with a nutritious and affordable diet, delivered in a sustainable way.
Satisfying the nutrition needs is becoming a challenge since the global population continues increasing (projected to reach over 9 billion by 2050). It is necessary to find new ways to produce more with less to save natural resources, improve resilience and increase net incomes to be able to meet the needs of the growing population.
Another key challenge to tackle is the impact that agriculture has on climate change and vice versa. Farming releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, in particular, significant amounts of methane and nitrous oxide. On the other hand, the effects of climate change are already affecting the crops. Warmer air temperatures have changed the length of the growing seasons, and hazard occurs all over the world threatening food security.
Transport is vital to the well-functioning of economic activities and a key to ensuring cohesion of populations. It ensures everyday mobility of people and is crucial to the production and distribution of goods and an adequate infrastructure is a fundamental precondition for transport systems.
Transportation infrastructures includes roads, highways, railways, airports, bridges, waterways, canals and terminals. All of them play important roles in the transmission of materials and the flow of population. When transport systems are efficient, they provide economic and social opportunities and benefits, that results in positive effects such has better accessibility to markets, employment and additional investments. But when transport systems are deficient in terms of capacity or reliability they can have the opposite effect, reducing opportunities and lowering quality of life.
Transport systems and mobility are not spared from the climate change consequences. It impacts on transportation infrastructure in form of permanent flooding of road, bridges, and ports, increasing service disruption. It is necessary to be able to prevent these consequences by improving the design before the construction or designing appropriate evacuation and contention plans when the infrastructure is already built in hazard areas. Also, it is critical to tackle the increasing pollution related to greater mobility.
Source: https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/transport/overview
Energy is central to many daily activities and is the drive force of industry. A proper access to energy is essential to creating more opportunities for communities all over the world and makes possible the development of new industries that will bring new jobs and will foster the entire economy. Without energy, essential services such as health care and education cannot properly be provided, and business operate under severe constraints, hindering the opportunities to grow.
About one billion people still live without electricity and hundreds of millions have not a reliable access to it. This turns into the use of polluting fuels like wood for daily housework such as cooking or heating, resulting in indoor air pollution that have a negative impact on health.
Energy is also closely related to one of the main concerns of the world nowadays: Climate Change. Energy sources are classified as renewable or nonrenewable. They can be used as primary energy sources, that would be the case for example of the fuel in a car, or the can be converted into secondary energy sources, such as electricity. In the world, most of the energy that is used, is supplied by nonrenewable energy sources, which include coal, natural gas, petroleum and uranium. But to obtain the energy we need we must burn these raw materials, which release particles and gases into the atmosphere.
Globally, more people live in urban areas than in rural areas. The most urbanized regions nowadays are Northern America, Latin America and the Caribbean and Europe. Only Africa remains mostly rural with 43% of its population living in urban areas and Asia is approximating 50% of urbanization. As the world continues to urbanize, sustainable development depends increasingly on the successful management of urban growth, especially in low-income and lower-middle-income countries where the most rapid urbanization is expected between now and 2050.
Megacities are also in the rise. They are large city metropolitan areas typically with a population of more than 10 million people. Currently one in eight live in 33 megacities and by 2030 the world is projected to have 43 of them, most in developing regions. When cities are growing, the need for essential infrastructure and services increases, and when this growth is rapid, ensuring access to housing, water, sanitation, electricity, public transport, education and health care for all is especially challenging.
There is also the problem of securing property rights, including land tenure, which are a rarely accessible luxury for most of the world’s poor and vulnerable people. Land tenure determines who can use land, for how long and under what conditions. Either if the tenure arrangements are based on official laws or on informal customs, if they are secure, they are an incentive not just to implement best practices, but also to invest more and propel the economic and social of the community.
Source: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/01/women-own-less-than-20-of-the-worlds-land-its-time-to-give-them-equal-property-rights/, http://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/land#1, https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/theme/urbanization/index.asp, https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/urbandevelopment/overview
Globally, more people live in urban areas than in rural areas. The most urbanized regions nowadays are Northern America, Latin America and the Caribbean and Europe. Only Africa remains mostly rural with 43% of its population living in urban areas and Asia is approximating 50% of urbanization. As the world continues to urbanize, sustainable development depends increasingly on the successful management of urban growth, especially in low-income and lower-middle-income countries where the most rapid urbanization is expected between now and 2050.
Poverty entails more than the lack of income and productive resources to ensure sustainable livelihoods. Its manifestations include hunger and malnutrition, limited access to education and other basic services, social discrimination and exclusion, as quell as the lack of participation in decision-making. While global poverty rates have been cut by more than half since 2000, one in ten people in developing regions still lives on less than US$1.90 a day, which is the internationally agreed poverty line, and millions of others live on slightly more than this daily amount.
The work to end extreme poverty is far from over. The latest projections show that the world will not be able to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030, because it is becoming more difficult to reach people remaining in extreme poverty who often live in fragile countries and remote areas. Moreover, for those who have been able to move out of poverty, progress is often temporary: Food insecurity and climate change threaten to take away from them their gains, forcing them back into poverty.
Poverty lies at the core of the development challenges. It is the underlying problem of every social challenge and it entails a high exposure to any catastrophe of any kind. By 2030, over 100 million people could fall back into extreme poverty due to climate change, while over 200 million people could be displaced due to more frequent and sever climatic disasters.
Source: "https://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/poverty/
Health, as defined by the World Health Organization, is “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. It is considered as one of the fundamental rights of every human being, and it is fundamental to the attainment of peace and security.
Ensuring healthy lives and promoting the well-being at all ages is essential to sustainable development. When people are healthy they can study, work, and support their community. Although there have been made significant progress in increasing life expectancy and reducing some of the common killers associated with child and maternal mortality, many more efforts are needed to fully eradicate a wide range of diseases and address many different persistent and emerging health issues.
Health is also related to other challenges around the world. Health expenses, for instance, are an important reason for which families around the world are pushed into poverty. To find ways to lower the costs of treatments are essential to reduce this menace. Different forms of pollution have a huge impact on human health. An estimated 4.2 million premature deaths globally are linked to ambient air pollution. Also, fertilizers, pesticides, sewage waters, heavy metals such as lead or mercury and chemical waste form industrial discharges contaminate water so it can become unsafe and harmful to human health.
Education is the process of learning and bringing a permanent change in a person’s knowledge and capacity to do things. Obtaining a quality education is the foundation to creating sustainable development. Education delivers large, consistent returns in terms of income and is the most important factor to ensure personal growth and long-term prosperity to the community. When people can get education, they can break from the cycle of poverty. However, education access must be matched by quality to really eradicate poverty and drive sustainable development to the communities.
Currently, while countries have significantly increased access to education, being in school does not always mean that the children are learning. Millions of them worldwide, reach young adulthood without even the most basic skills of reading and mathematics.
To ensure that the skills needed in an ever-changing environment are developed and provided around the world there is an urgent need on new mechanisms and tools to anticipate and identify current and future skills needs to ensure the relevance of education and mobilize the international community to support investment in infrastructure and connectivity.
Source: https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/education/", https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/education/overview