It is Disheartening for A World At War to Be Talking About Commitment to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

The fight for sustainable development must not be left to one man, António?Manuel de Oliveira?Guterres. All leaders must speak up and speak out. They must demonstrate the seriousness that the sustainable development agenda and the sustainable development goals deserve.

The UN Sustainable Development Goals have been chunked into five groups of people, planet, prosperity, partnerships and peace. In final analysis, these goals are for the people and their planet. By people I mean the present and the future generations. Prosperity is a desirable. Partnerships are the means to an end for the people and the planet. Peace is, interestingly both an input into achieving the other goals as well as an end goal, a desirable. Without peace prosperity is difficult if not impossible to attain. Without peace there can be no partnership. Without peace attention to all the other goals is severely compromised. The best in terms of sustainable development goals is achieved only when the world is at peace. War is the extreme opposite of peace. And the world is at war. People are being killed, maimed and displaced. Wealth, including homes and infrastructure has been, as is being destroyed by wars around the world. A large proportion of people in war torn zones like Ukraine, Palestine, West Africa, East Africa and other parts of the world are starving, dying of hunger and disease, their prosperity is being wiped out, leading to probably intergenerational poverty.

Large amounts of financial and other resources are being sucked up by war producing weapons of war and financing war operations. A lot more is now being channelled to provide food, shelter and basic health care to millions who were once able to look after themselves and infact contribute to human development and economic prosperity. Those resources being used to drive wars and to deal with the damages from war could have been used to further advance human wellbeing, planet and environmental protection. Is it is not sad that climate action, probably the single most important issue that we must tackle, remains underfunded in a world were funding for wars is as ubiquitous as atmospheric oxygen? ?

If we look at our world today, big nations spend more in military hardware and military training. A lot is written about their sophisticated weapons including how much they cost to produce. These big nations compare each other’s military might and how devastating their military technology is. As humans we really get carried away and sing along when these big nations brag about their military technology. Yet we forget that this technology is being made to kill and maim other human beings and to destroy infrastructure that may have cost billions and trillions to build, infrastructure on which innocent human beings depend for their prosperity and wellbeing. The same technology seriously pollutes the environment-land, air, water, people and plants. This pollution damages the environment, some of it permanently and irreversibly. Cleaning up military pollution gobbles huge amounts of financial resources ; resources that could be used to reduce hunger and poverty somewhere on the planet.

For environment scientists, engineers and technologists, sustainable development workers and sustainable development advocates, it is disheartening when global leaders seem to prioritising war and pushing aside or shelving off the sustainable development agenda to engage in wars. It crushes the spirit when the world seems to be struggling to fund sustainable development action but can easily fund wars. It is heart breaking that a big chunk of global leaders, especially African leaders only mumble or remain mum when the world is at war and it is heading in a very dangerous direction that renders all the effort towards sustainable development to date an exercise in futility. Global leaders must speak up for peace and not bury their heads in the sands like Ostriches.

The fight for sustainable development must not be left to one man, António?Manuel de Oliveira?Guterres. All leaders must speak up and speak out. They must demonstrate the seriousness that the sustainable development agenda and the sustainable development goals deserve.

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?Simon Bere, 2024