Name: UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): What They Are & Why They're Important
Uploaded: 2026-02-02T04:13:58.000Z
Duration: 17 min 38 s
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Maybe if you've heard of them, put your hand up.

If you, without looking at the wall, can list all 17.

I was going to say, if you could list them in order of the colors of the rainbow.

So we're going to just start with sort of five or ten minutes to talk a little bit about what these things are called, the SDGs.

Obviously a lot of people have shown up today, which I'm super excited about, but it would be good to have a bit of a baseline understanding.

So the Sustainable Development Goals were launched and adopted in September of 2015 by all 193 UN member states.

It was a process that draw to conclusion.

Three years of fairly robust community consultation, which saw over 8 million people discuss and frame out the issues that mattered most in their communities and on the planet.

They ended up with 17 goals, but they raised 300 issues through that community consultation process.

And so tucked within each of these 17 goals is actually a great deal of thought, a great deal of consultation.

And this really is meant to represent a best guess, I guess, at the issues that matter most and the things that if we were to achieve them over the next 12 years, would fundamentally transform the planet.

Who's heard of the Millennium Development Goals?

Who worked on the Millennium Development Goals?

Who was excited by the Millennium Development Goals?

This is not the first international framework.

There have been many, many international frameworks that come before it.

So what I wanted to do is just take a moment to understand and to share a little bit about why the SDGs are actually pretty different from the things that came before them.

Because we know that the UN has a tendency to produce exceptional frameworks.

And then when we don't meet those goals, you know, two years in advance, we start producing another exceptional framework with a longer timeline.

And the SDGs are actually a little bit different.

So again, I mentioned the Millennium Development Goals.

These were not a set of goals that landed in any particularly significant way in Canada, unless you were working within the international development sector.

And even then our engagement was largely focused on kind of bilateral aid.

So I wanted to paint a little bit of a picture about how the Millennium Development Goals are quite different from the SDGs, even though they're both three letter acronyms that sound pretty similar to one another.

So first and foremost, the Millennium Development Goals were an agenda that focused on what we would have called, and still call in some contexts, developing countries.

This was really meant to be an agenda that helped address challenges being faced by developing countries.

And Canada's role was really as a bilateral funder to help other countries develop.

We've learned a lot in the international development context through the years that this is really not inappropriate context and in fact that many of the issues that are being faced in developing countries are issues we experience here at home as well.

And so unlike the Millennium Development Goals, which were really about Canada looking at other places and trying to help, the SDGs are really a universal agenda.

They are both domestic and they are international in nature.

So this is really a set of goals that we need to think about in the context of our own organizations, our own communities, and in the context of Canada, as well as an agenda that can really help us think through our meaningful engagement with countries around the world.

At the end of the day, we're going to talk a little bit about data today, but really I want to talk more about the kind of high level opportunity that the SDGs present.

The indicator coverage of the Millennium Development Goals wasn't particularly substantive.

They were focused on a specific set of 8 goals, 21 targets, and underpinned with 60 indicators.

The SDGs again are a much more robust data set.

So it gives us actually a unique and much deeper opportunity to understand our impact as organizations, as communities, as a country.

But underneath those 17 goals are a really deeply interconnected set of 169 targets and 230 indicators.

And what's actually most important is not the number of targets and indicators that they are, but, but how the SDGS requires us to think about data.

The slogan of the SDGs we can problematize the language is leave no one behind.

But what that means from a data perspective is that in past indicators, if we were to take the Millennium Development Goals and look internally, or if we take the Livable Cities Index or any of the indices around the world through rose colored glasses, Canada's often pretty high up on that list.

Education is good, health care is good, there are economic opportunities, et cetera.

Except if you disaggregate that data and you look at sub populations, you look at people that are traditionally marginalized.

If you look at Canada's indigenous populations and communities, we are failing outright and abysmally.

And so what the SDGS requires is actually that this data doesn't paint an aggregate picture of how Canada is doing on these 17 goals, but actually requires us to look at every single subpopulation including those that are most traditionally and historically marginalized.

And if we fail to meet the goals for any one of those populations, we have failed.

We know that if we want to get towards meeting some of these very complex challenges, this isn't something that any individual organization, any individual sector or group is going to be able to accomplish.

It really needs to be cross sectoral, cross place, cross definition agenda.

The SDGs break down silos between places.

This is a set of goals for our community, for Canada and for the world.

It breaks down silos between definitions.

There are a lot of different definitions of sustainability.

And we could spend the whole morning and the whole day trying to figure out what it is, but at a really high level.

This is one of the most robust definitions of sustainability insofar as it actually defines sustainability through its environmental or ecological, its economic and its social dimensions.

And so this is a much broader definition than we might have used historically.

When we think about environmental sustainability or when we use sustainability in the context of international development, it breaks down silos between the issues.

Yes, there are 17 goals, but as you go down into the indicators and sub indicators, you can actually see how interconnected those goals are.

So this isn't just about bringing together poverty reduction agencies to work better together on poverty, bringing together food insecurity or hunger focused agencies to work better on reducing food insecurity in Canada or globally.

It is really about breaking down the silos between all of these issues and recognizing how interconnected they are and how interconnected our relationship with land, nature and ecology is with our relationship to the place that we live in cities and communities.

This is an agenda that actually requires policy coherence and interdepartmental participation.

Community Foundations Canada is based in Ottawa.

But this is actually a major challenge for the federal government right now because it requires one hand to know what the other is doing.

It requires that when one policy is formulated, it isn't obstructing another policy and it isn't obstructing our collective ability to work as a country forward towards advancing these goals.

The SDGs, again, were built with all sectors in mind.

And while I would love to say that civil society was at the heart of that and that we really were driving the agenda from day one in September of 2015, actually the private sector was some of the first organizations globally to sign onto this agenda.

And there are large multilateral organizations that recognize that this is the future that we need that are actually not only thinking about their CSR activities, but fundamentally rethinking about how they're running their business so that they are producing less of the negative externalities that they might have produced in past years.

And lastly, it's an attempt at breaking down silos between people.

Again, we talked a little bit about the leave no one behind adage.

This is really an agenda that was built through participation and community consultation at a scale that the UN had never undertaken before.

This was driven by community and it really requires the participation of everybody if we're actually going to get towards meeting these goals by 2030.

Simply put, the SDGs are a shared language, or at least a best attempt at a shared language.

And while that's a pretty simple statement, it's actually pretty transformative when you think about what it means for our ability to work again across geographies, how we can start to share knowledge, share information in a reliable and a data driven way with organizations that might be like ours, but that are operating in a different part of the world, or how we can actually think about the issues that we're facing in our communities with a common language that might be spoken by government.

I've been spending years trying to figure out government speak.

I haven't gotten there yet, so there might actually be a shared language there or to connect with the private sector.

Recently a guy named Arthur Bull came up to me.

He runs the Rural Nova Scotia Community foundation.

And he said, JP, we're all about the SDGs in rural Nova Scotia.

That kind of shocked and surprised me at this early stage in the game.

And he said, we've been fighting a battle to protect oceans and fisheries for three decades and nobody's been listening.

And we for the first time have an opportunity to speak the same language as others in our community about the importance of protecting oceans.

And of course, it's an attempt at a shared measurement system.

We don't all have to pivot and measure to the SDGs, but we can triangulate using the SDGs.

And so very quickly we can understand how one organization's work compares to another and build a picture that is cohesive enough to really get to the root of where the gaps are as we think about this 12 year journey we're going to be on connected to the SDGs.

So that brings us to the question of how Canada is doing guesses.

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UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): What They Are & Why They're Important

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