The unexplored scope of sustainability: SDGs, SDFs and SDEs

Since 2015, the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) framework has been a convenient reference to understand the scope of Sustainable Development and to build a global, coherent narrative and roadmap. Just like the Ten Commandments, the SDGs succinctly list the 17 goals that we should strive to achieve individually and collectively in order to enable our society and environment to sustain, longer and healthier.

I have taught a lot about the SDGs and have been one of its most diligent ambassadors, especially as Sustainability Director of?Techno India Group ?— which counts 100,000 students from K-12 to college at any point of time — and as co-founder of?Y-East ?which aggregates more than 100 sustainability-focused organisations in East and North East India. The SDGs are so convenient to provide a clear introduction to learners; however, as soon as you want to dive deeper and customise the SDGs to each individual learner, you start to face roadblocks related to the framework’s lack of preciseness and practicality: in which sectors and industries should these goals be implemented? By who? And most importantly,?how?

I entertain the belief that no matter which studies or career one opts for, there is always a way to adapt traditional paths and address sustainability. So many different talents populate this earth. Each of us has a unique set of skills, sensitivities and interests that we need to be able to accommodate and utilise for social, societal and environmental enhancement. We therefore need to find ways to visualise sustainable development beyond the spectrum of the 17 SDGs, which only provide a relatively narrow and vague understanding of all the tools and all the ways one can contribute to a more sustainable tomorrow.

In an attempt to further specify and map the framework more practically and at the service of individual career decisions, I developed two complementary frameworks: the?17 Sustainable Development Fields (SDFs)?and the?17 Sustainable Development Enablers (SDEs). While the former refers to the?industries?which we need to reinvent and make more sustainable, the latter provides a list of the?tools?we can use to enable change towards sustainability. As you read along the 17 SDFs and SDGs below, I invite you to reflect on your own interests and skills, and determine your?Personal Key Combination(s) (PKC), i.e. the optimal SDG-SDF-SDE combination(s) that fit(s) the causes you have most at heart and your unique strengths. For instance, I have determined my PKC to be SDG4 Quality Education / SDF12 Education and Skills Development / SDE7 Citizen and Community Movements. Do consider your PKC as flexible: you can explore more than one PKC, and one PKC can include more than one item from each of the three frameworks. Eventually, these complementary frameworks should be able to help you navigate sustainability in relation to your professional and personal development, and to guide you in choosing a path that is unique and specific to you.

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Sustainable Development Fields

SDF 1- Agriculture, fishery and F&B: The art and science of cultivating the soil, raising livestock and fishing, from nature to plate, from extraction to consumption, need to be comprehended through the spectrum of generated social and environmental impact. Scientific research has notably proven the health and environmental benefits of plant-based diets, which have timidly started to gather momentum.

SDF 2- FMCG: Fast-Moving Consumer Goods — which include packaged foods, beverages, cosmetics, toiletries and other consumables — are products that bought on a regular basis and typically don’t stay very long on the market shelf. Tightly associated with the concepts of single use, mass consumption and daily waste, the production, packaging and consumption cycles of these items need to be reinvented in order to both be more environmentally healthy and meet the consumers’ needs.

SDF 3- Textile and Fashion: Fashion — especially fast fashion — is the second most polluting industry after Oil and Gas, sadly reputed for its environmentally damaging production processes, the questionable working conditions within the industry, its fast consumption patterns and heavy waste left in our landfills. Changing the status quo in this regard implies to raise awareness about sustainable fashion, increase cloth items’ lifespan, treat fabric waste especially through innovative processes such as circular economy and upcycling, better allocate resources to stakeholders involved in the production line.

SDF 4- Electronics: Technologies, individual gadgets and heavy hardware have invaded households and organisations, making us both more productive and bigger generators of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (widely known as WEEE or e-waste). Planned obsolescence and unsafe e-waste disposal are two of the many challenges this industry needs to address.

SDF 5- Energy and utilities: Our transition from fossil-fuel energy to renewable energy has significantly accelerated in the past couple of decades, with the leadership of and successful case studies hailing from countries such as Iceland, Paraguay, Norway, Denmark, Austria, Brazil, Chile, China, Australia, Costa Rica. Solar, wind, hydro and other energy solutions are key to a sustainable future which does not deplete energy source sand run out of power. Questions remain about how to accelerate the transition and how to make sure that the energy sector creates millions of jobs to sustain a green economy.

SDF 6- Natural resources and Raw Materials: Natural resources are the foundation of everything humans are able to invent, build and do. Invasive and thoughtless exploitation of said resources, which includes forestry and deforestation, destroys natural habitats, reduces biodiversity and eventually annihilates the ability of all living species to thrive. Securing a sustainable supply of raw materials that have been extracted responsibly in regards to the resources’ ability to renew, and to safe and fair working conditions, is indispensable to a long-lasting and resilient environment.

SDF 7- Construction, Real Estate and Urban Planning: Solutions for humans’ habitats and activities, crystallised under the term ‘development projects’, usually infringe on natural territories on land, over sea, and even towards the sky. More sustainable solutions need to be found to enable cohabitation, where new development projects harmoniously coexist and interact with their specific natural surroundings while social and environmental footprint is duly and continuously assessed.

SDF 8- Home, Hospitality and Tourism: As population and middle-to-high classes increase in numbers, residential capacities, moving into bigger homes, and touristic migrations into hotels and AirB&Bs are boosted along. These sectors are powerful vectors of discovery and new adventures, and therefore also opportunities to start afresh and venture into new, more responsible home design, furnishing and habits, and into supporting traditional local activities, art and ecosystem through travel.

SDF 9- Healthcare and Pharma: Research and technological progress in the spaces of healthcare, medtech and pharma have strengthened our collective immunity overtime, for both our physical and mental health. Today, the sector mostly requires progress in regards to technology and profit-related ethics (especially in the space of biotech), political decisions for access to healthcare services, accessibility, affordability for all and inclusion of marginalised communities. Persisting inequalities in access to healthcare services is also a significant threat to our ability to sustain as a society.

SDF 10- IT and Telecom: The Telecommunications sector gathers companies which globally connect people through phone, internet, cloud and other remote solutions. Though partially invisible to our eyes, this infrastructural network of data servers, wires and cables is very much there, to the tune of more than 8 millions data centres, 380 underwater cables spanning a length of over 1.2 million kilometres around the world, and other facilities such as Satellite Communications facilities. On top of mental health considerations and changes in the way we operate as humans, the way we exchange and power data to the world comes with heavy installing, maintenance, electricity and environmental bills, which cannot be ignored and need to be further optimised to sustain.

SDF 11- Media, Advertising and Marketing: The power of media, advertising and marketing techniques have evolved and strengthened overtime, using techniques to hook the brain which hail from new knowledge in the fields of psychology and neuroscience. Today, the younger generations spend more time in the virtual world than the physical one, absorbing social media and streaming platform contents. What if we used this power to meaningful ends, towards environmental awareness, social inclusion and societal wellbeing, and to spread the use of products and services that strongly align with the SDGs?

SDF 12- Education and Skills Development: The main challenges in the education sector around the world can be summed up into one key question: are we properly equipping our young generations with the tools to navigate a world in constant change, and to solve today and tomorrow’s most pressing challenges? Unfortunately for most countries, the answer is: not yet. The traditional dichotomy between public and private education, unequal access to quality and complete education based on socio-economic background and genders, subject-wise learning hierarchy and silos, lack of research and curriculum contents related to sustainable development, and persisting gaps between taught skills and job market needs are some of the key issues we are still to find efficient solutions to.

SDF 13- Manufacturing and Packaging: Following the financial and economic deregulation in the 1980s, our production lines have become increasingly and fundamentally global. New challenges have arisen in this era of globalisation, which require talents to tackle: responsible stakeholders management i.e. fair treatment and distribution of resources to all stakeholders involved in the production chain, no matter how remote they are from the headquarters; decrease in prices allowed by cheaper labor force abroad leading to ever more mass consumption and therefore more waste; environmental pollution — related to the manufacturing, packaging, delivery and consumption cycles — which especially affects low-income and marginalised communities.

SDF 14- Logistics and Distribution: The advent of globalisation has transformed the space of logistics and triggered new long-lasting realities especially related to global value chain (GVC). Although it may have created enhanced customer satisfaction thanks to online ordering and last-mile delivery, it also created new, complex issues such as the erosion of commercial neighbourhoods and small shops to the profit of big malls and Amazon-like aggregators, destruction of local employment, heavy environmental pollution related to the necessary packaging and transport required for products to keep fresh while travelling the world. While delocalisation and globalisation benefitted from quite a unanimous acclaim, today, mouvements of relocalisation and anti-globalisation are asking the right questions and gathering momentum.

SDF 15- Transports and Aerospace: Mobility solutions, from daily home-to-office commutes to travelling to space, from public tuktuks to the Hyperloop, have always been a switch for fascination and sophisticated innovations. A productive economy, it seems, is one that moves around, travels and explores. However, the advent of fuel-hungry private vehicles and frantic plane travels on a whim have brought transport energy to almost a third of total energy consumption worldwide. Efficient public transportation, car pooling, electric and hydrogen-powered vehicles have offered fascinating leads into a sustainable mobility world.

SDF 16- Finance, Banking and Insurance: The economical, institutional and financial power of the finance, banking and insurance sectors is undeniable, as they offer well-organised money-aggregating spaces and smooth-running financial mechanisms for everyone’s daily monetary affairs and insurance coverage. With great power comes great responsibility… What are the ways in which such mechanisms can be reinvented towards achieving the SDGs, especially in terms of poverty alleviation, reduced inequalities and the financing of a green economy? Great models from impact investment to microcredit to social impact bonds have been showing the way.

SDF 17- Luxury goods: Luxury is often associated with obnoxious lifestyles and perceived as an antonym to sustainability. In many ways however, luxury goods, for their quality, can be a lot more ‘sustainable’ than other fast-consumed, cheaper products. Sustainable luxury is increasingly aligned with conscious consumer behaviours and expectations, to truly include social and environmental sustainability at its core and go beyond gimmicky moves which can be perceived as greenwashing.

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Sustainable Development Enablers

SDE 1- Tech for Good: Technology is a tool which can be useful for social and environmental impact in so many ways. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, 3D printing, blockchain, cloud computing, robotics, biotechnology… and many more tech tools can be activated to gain in efficiency and implement at a large scale, while improving well-being, tackling inequalities and building a green economy from the ground up. As a matter of fact, most SDGs would have their tech offshoot: edtech, agritech, medtech…

SDE 2- Awareness and Education: “Awareness is like the sun. When it shines on things, they are transformed”. Global spiritual leader Thich Nhat Hanh implies here that awareness, reinforced by more in-depth educational inputs, is the first step towards individual and systemic change. Well-articulated, mind-opening awareness campaigns can not only shed light on unknown facts and taboos, but it can also trigger a sense of concern, care, and willingness to act in more than one heart, eventually leading to individual and collective action.

SDE 3- Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Converting impactful innovations into long-lasting businesses through entrepreneurship is an efficient weapon to create social value through employment?and?social impact through the new ventures’ activities themselves, especially through impact entrepreneurship (a term I prefer over social entrepreneurship) which places the SDGs at the core of their DNA. Innovative and entrepreneurial mindsets in general, whether applied to the creation of new ventures, to intrapreneurship or to open innovation, call for needs-based and problem-solving approaches, which is in essence the first logical steps towards solving the issues suggested by the SDG framework.

SDE 4- Inclusive Business Models: Innovation may also occur in regards to the very way business models are thought and deployed. The days of traditional business models of extracting, producing, selling to an unsegregated target audience at a fixed price through one delivery channel are over. Today, there are plethora of inspiring business models embracing the 5P’s (People, Planet, Prosperity, Peace, Partnerships) encapsulated in the SDG framework, using witty mechanisms to offer products and services in a more socially inclusive and environmentally respectful way: cross-subsidisation, circular production lines, servicisation, performance-based contracts, rent-to-own / leasing models, value-for-value models etc.

SDE 5- Human Psychology and Neuroscience: In the past couple of decades, the fields of psychology and neuroscience have opened groundbreaking pathways to better understand our own brains. Humans are creatures of habits whose behaviours, even seemingly irrational behaviours, can be understood through the spectrum neuronal and hormonal activity. New theoretical fields with very concrete applications such as neuromarketing or the nudge theory have proved powerful game changers for new, more sustainable consumer behaviours and individual habits at scale.

SDE 6- Culture, Values and Ethics: Value education, cultural traditions, religions and belief systems in general have a tremendous influence on how people build their sense of ethics and socially behave. Values of care and respect for nature, for example, are at the core of religions such as hindusim, jainism or taoism, and essential to numerous indigenous cultures such as the Maori culture in New Zealand. How to discover and spread the most sustainable world views, and thereby regenerate the nature of our relationship with others and nature?

SDE 7- Citizen and Community Movements: The power of collective approaches have historically shown powerful for both systemic change (here we would remember the Civil Rights Movement in the US, or Fridays for Future launched by Greta Thunberg), and reduction of inequalities of access through decentralised action and fairer distribution. For example, community healthcare implemented in countries such as Liberia enables last-mile delivery of healthcare services. Localised action appears to be the only way to tackle centralised, unequal systems that tend to only profit the most privileged urban population.

SDE 8- Creativity, Arts and Design: Our ability to achieve the Goals relies upon our capacity to dream, imagine and then design solutions for a more sustainable world. Our imagination is the only channel towards a better tomorrow that is yet to exist. The domains of the arts and design offer powerful creative tools to raise awareness, break taboos, elevate the dialogue and trigger action towards our common vision. Art for Good, artfulness and artivism are interesting declinations of the term which further indicate how we can use these tools towards the SDGs.

SDE 9- Communication, Media and Entertainment: By definition, entertaining refers to the ability to hold the attention and interest of an audience — which big social media oligopolies, TV channels, streaming platforms and advertisement companies have learnt to master. Gaming for good, TikTok for Good, Facebook fundraisers, shocking investigative documentaries are other specific examples of how entertainment can do wonders in terms of impact.

SDE 10- Organisational Culture, Policy and Processes: Companies and other organisations significantly structure our lives as well as the economic landscape worldwide. In the same way a family or a country has a culture associated with specific codes, organisations control rules and behaviours within their ambit. Responsible leadership at the top does matter a whole lot, and sets the tone for collective willingness to adopt more sustainable organisational practices, from responsible stakeholders management to inclusive HR policies to enhanced Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategy, to carbon offsetting and insetting.

SDE 11- Non-Profit Sector And Philanthropy: Although criticised for its top-down and relatively short term approach (inserting food for thoughts here: There wouldn’t be anyone available today to efficiently think about future generations — i.e. sustainably — if present generations were not taken care of as well; so some short to mid-term action may make sense, too!), philanthropy implemented through Civil Society Organisations play a key role, not only in emergency relief efforts but also in our collective progress towards social and environmental change. This sector enables resources to meet local needs and rectify inequalities, usually acting as a necessary complement to public services that are lagging behind.

SDE 12- Policy Advocacy, Political and Legal Frameworks: Systemic change without supportive governments and legal framework is close to impossible. Legal compliance is the ultimate way to orientate mass behaviours at scale, and more responsible policy-making is the ultimate goal to ensure sustained change, as laws and rights get established and claimed. Properly enforced civil rights, environmental, CSR and ESG laws essentially align all stakeholders, binding them to play the game.

SDE 13- Market Mechanisms and Economic Policies: Market mechanisms define the way resources are sold and bought at the level of a national economy. For example, supply and demand flow differently in free market economies than they do under planned, controlled markets. The way economic policies establish the rules of supply and demand, from pricing to taxing, plays a key role in resource allocation and distribution, accessibility and affordability, and, of course, environmental sustainability, especially since the Kyoto Protocol put a price on carbon.

SDE 14- Investment and Financial Mechanisms: Responsible finance invites financial players to invest in socially inclusive and environmentally responsible companies, while disinvesting in harmful ones. An increasing number of investment platforms and funds rely on ESG standards and indexes for their investment decisions. Responsible finance has also taken the shape of new, powerful mechanisms at scale, such as Social Stock Exchanges.

SDE 15- Research, Data, Analytics and Assessment: Thank you, Lord Kelvin, for your famous “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it”. We have to know the objective facts about the status quo to be able to rationalise our understanding and determine necessary action. For example, social and environmental impact assessment, both pre and post-implementation, allow us to evaluate the desirability and efficiency of a given project, thereby informing and guiding responsible decision-making.

SDE 16- Reporting and Transparency: The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), founded in 1997, set the tone for a new wave of enhanced standardisation and reporting at the global level. Numerous countries and companies have now embraced annual ESG reporting following standardised frameworks, in a (compliant) spirit of transparency for their stakeholders and shareholders. This, in turn, informs better investment choices and redirect resources towards organisations that increasingly focus on their social and environmental responsibility.

SDE 17- Cooperation and Collaboration: Achieving the SDGs will require us to let go of our competitive habits and to show a genuine will to cooperate and share resources. More and more organisations are striving to activate community-based, open-sourced, crowdsourced, collective intelligence approaches (such as the alliances I am associated with, namely?Y-East , Youth for Sustainability India Alliance and?#LearningPlanet ) , thereby truly embodying SDG17- Partnerships for the Goals.

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Of course, these frameworks are not perfect, starting with the SDGs, which omits a few objectives (e.g. preservation of cultural heritage) and includes a few contradictions, especially in relation to SDG8 which rushes into the controversial and more-than-uncertain conclusion that economic growth and sustainability go hand in hand. You may also have noticed that a few items are overlapping, or may be missing. The 3D mapping based of these models is yet to be built; and we may need a forth dimension that we could call the 17 Sustainable Development Stakeholders (SDSs) to have the full picture (although you would get a good idea about the stakeholders in place as you read between the lines of the SDFs and SDEs).

In the meantime, I believe these complementary frameworks provide further enlightenment on the way we can achieve a sustainable society and environment, and accelerate the shift, by allowing each and everyone of us to position ourselves , guide individual decision-making and best put our talents to use. On average, we are called to work 80–100,000 hours in total throughout our professional career, so better combine it with meaningful impact while we’re at it, don’t you think?

Wishing each of you the best on your impactful journey ahead!