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By Edda Pleitez
The writer, a student at the University of Texas, Austin and 2019 GFI Summer Intern, explains how some of the world’s most advanced economies and free societies implement the SDGs. This article first appeared in Global Financial Integrity.
AUSTIN, Texas, USA (IDN-INPS) – The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are a set of measurable, attainable and time-bound objectives that were accepted by all 193 Member States of the United Nations in 2015.
By Kizito Makoye with Goodhope Amani
DAR ES SALAAM (IDN) – It is a typically hot and humid afternoon in Gongo la Mboto on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam and Abdullah Nyambi is busy shoving plastic waste into a giant metal kiln with an iron rod ready to make pavement slabs.
With a shiny yellow breathing mask perched on his nose, Nyambi briskly mixes the melting plastic while methodically sprinkling sand on it to make it stiff. “We use any type of plastic to make the slabs,” says Nyambi, with trails of sweat soaking his yellow T-shirt. A plume of black smoke rises into the sky as fierce fire obliterates the plastic material and turns it into a thick liquid.
By Santo D. Banerjee
NEW YORK (IDN) – As host city to the United Nations, New York is making the most of its position through its ambitious Global Vision, Urban Action (GVUA) platform that uses the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a common framework for building a better city for its people and their environment. This programme links multiple New York departments through shared sustainability objectives—and it has been selected as a good practice in a new UN DESA database of SDG actions, which could be scaled up or replicated around the world.
By Jeffrey Moyo
HARARE (IDN) – More than a decade ago, he lost his home as diamond miners from China razed it to the ground searching for the gems. Still, today, 74-year old Tobias Mukwada lives with his family in shanty thatched huts they erected hoping that perhaps one day the Chinese diamond merchants would remember them and offer them a decent home.
But for the poverty-stricken Mukwada and his family, it may be a wait in vain.
Zimbabwe’s former president Robert Mugabe ordered Chinese diamond miners out of the mining fields in the country’s eastern highlands in 2016.
By Lisa Vives, Global Information Network
NEW YORK (IDN) – Strike! That’s the sound of the world's top two producers of cocoa who say they are suspending their sales for better prices.
The governments of Ivory Coast and Ghana are trying this time-honored strategy to address the imbalance between farmers’ income and money made by foreign commodity markets who scoop up most of the profit.
If the strategy sounds familiar, it’s the same one described in the Greek play Lysistrata where the women withheld affection from their husbands in order to secure peace and end the Peloponnesian War.
By Lowana Veal
REYKJAVIK (IDN) – On September 5, 2017 – two years after the United Nations adopted Agenda 2030 with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 targets – the Nordic countries jointly launched the Generation 2030 programme with the aim of speeding up implementation of Agenda 2030 through official Nordic cooperation.
A budget of 1.925 million dollars was allocated for the project, which runs until December 2020.
By Josephine Latu-Sanft
For the eminent American actor and director Dustin Hoffman sunshine and coconut milk are "the two basic items necessary to sustain life". The German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht compared love to a coconut "which is good while it is fresh". In the Pacific, coconut is king, writes Josephine Latu-Sanft.
LONDON | PORT VILA (IDN) – Known as the ‘tree of life’, locals make use of every part of the tree to survive – the fruit for eating, husks for fuelling fires, fronds for making multiuse baskets, and the trunk for building houses.
By ACP Press
BRUSSELS (ACP-IDN) – Recent studies have shown that overhunting for wild meat is threatening hundreds of wildlife species with extinction, with the result that many indigenous peoples and rural communities are deprived of food and income.
An initiative of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Group of States, the Sustainable Wildlife Management (SWM) Programme, established to tackle these challenges, has published their first newsletter to bring attention to these issues.
By Lisa Vives, Global Information Network
NEW YORK | ACCRA (IDN) – Environmental groups in Ghana are waging an eleventh-hour battle to stop the government of Ghana from opening the Atewa Forest Reserve – a crown jewel of biodiversity and a source of three rivers – to commercial large-scale bauxite mining.
Their resistance conforms to the Fourth United Nations Environment Assembly's resolution on mining resource governance in Nairobi from March 11-15. The resolution stresses in particular Sustainable Development Goal 7 calling for 'affordable and clean energy' and Goal 12 on 'responsible consumption and production', "reminding the important contribution of mining to their achievement".
By Justus Wanzala
NAIROBI (IDN) – Global gross domestic product has doubled since 1970, enabling immense progress, and lifting of billions of people out of poverty. At the same time, this economic growth has been fueled by a relentless demand for natural resources. At no point in time nor at any level of income, has our demand for natural resources wavered, notes the Global Resources Outlook 2019.
"Our consume and throwaway models of consumption have had devastating impacts on our planet," says the report presented during the fourth session of the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) in Nairobi, Kenya, March 11-15.
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