We live in a world of acronyms: AI, ASAP, BTW, LOL, TYT, IMO and the list goes on. There are so many acronyms it sometimes gets confusing. One acronym can also have multiple meanings. There is even a metaphor for the abundance of acronyms: alphabet soup.

Nevertheless, there is one acronym that everyone should be familiar with, as it refers to the global goals that the world’s nations have agreed to. This acronym can secure an enduring and resilient planet for future generations while opening the potential of the existing ones: “SDGs” or the Sustainable Development Goals, is an acronym that should change the way we live.

In January 2016, the 2030 agenda came into effect; seventeen goals with one big objective: to a have a sustainable planet for every human being and life. The goals are wide-ranging and somewhat interdependent, yet each has a solid list of targets to achieve. Achieving all 169 targets would indicate accomplishing all 17 SDGs. They cover social and economic development issues including poverty, hunger, health, education, climate change, gender equality, water, sanitation, energy, urbanization, environment and justice. SDGs aim to solve some of the world’s most tenacious challenges.

When the world’s minds put themselves together to solve global challenges, we have spectacular results. It’s true. In the previous development agenda, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), we succeeded in halving poverty, securing access to education and improved healthcare.

But the success in bringing hundreds of millions out of poverty, and into the middle class has magnified another problem: That of sustainability. The new middle class want to consume like the old middle class. And we still have only one planet with finite resources and countless hardships.

The relatively new SDGs could be categorised into one or more ultimate goals:

• End poverty
• Protect the planet
• Ensure prosperity for all

With less than thirteen years left to achieve the SDGs, it's crucial that we accelerate progress for all while doing so sustainably.

It might sound like more than enough, but when you get to know the figures, the thirteen years would feel like an inflexible deadline. Almost 767 million people still live on less than 2 US dollars a day, and 793 million people are still hungry with future food security still a dream. The risk of maternal deaths need to be halved. We need more determined progress towards sustainable energy and greater investments in sustainable infrastructure. And we need to bring quality education within reach of all. Gender inequality is still a challenge in all societies. Young people continue to be one of the most vulnerable segments due to unemployment and economic slowdowns.

Pollution is peaking and has already become health hazardous in tens of countries. Nine out of 10 city dwellers are living in cities where air pollution is a health hazard. Global warming remains a challenge, setting a new record of about 1.1 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial period and causing an increased incidence of extreme weather events. One ambitions agenda, 17 goals, 169 targets and only 13 years left.

At the United Nations, Sustainable Development is at the heart of all that we do and is central to our UN's quest and duty to support the world’s nations. Our challenge now is to mobilise action that will bring these agendas meaningfully and tangibly to life. [1]

SDGs, also known as the “Leaving no one behind agenda”, are not limited to the United Nations or any other organisation. The 2030 Development Agenda is holistic and for all countries and people with SDGs that are mutually reinforcing and interdependent. SDGs are everybody’s business, because business, as usual, is not an option for a sustainable future.

The Sustainable Development Goals are important, with world-changing objectives that will require cooperation among governments, international organisations and world leaders. And “No one left behind” entails that even you as an individual can make an impact.

Change starts with you. Every human on Earth could be a proactive doer and part of the solution. It does not have to be through a social initiative or donations to some organisation. Resynchronising our clocks, so we all work for SDGs is what matters the most. There are easy things we can adopt into our routines that, if we all do them, will make a big difference.

Start by shopping for local products when these are competitive. Governments should ensure that the environmental costs are included in energy pricing, to remove hidden subsides that encourage longer transport. This will also be good for local businesses, employment while reducing air pollution. Use less plastic bottles and shopping bags, especially the single-use ones that end up in the oceans harming our environment. Consider using a bicycle for short trips or enjoying the benefits of walking to reduce the consumption of gas and save money. Try to make changes to your diet. Eating more vegetables and less beef is good for your health and better for the environment. Mentor young people at work and in your social circle. It’s a thoughtful, inspiring and a powerful way to guide someone towards a better future.

Before you get concerned about your personal space and your freedom of choice, the 2030 agenda is not about limiting people’s choices. It is about making mindful, responsible decisions. The SDGs work in the spirit of partnership and pragmatism to make the right choices now to improve life, in a sustainable way, for future generations.

Together, we can realise the Sustainable Development Goals.

[1] https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2017

By Frode Mauring / The United Nations Resident Coordinator and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Resident Representative a.i. to the UAE

With populations growing, along with continued urbanisation and climate change, there is no question that we will need far more cooling. By 2050, according to the Green Cooling Initiative, there could be more than 9.5bn cooling appliances worldwide – more than 2.5 times today’s 3.6bn. Cooling, however, is energy intensive. Even with the development of more efficient cooling technologies and other more aggressive energy mitigation strategies, the cooling sector will, on current trajectory, increase its overall energy consumption by at least 90% to 7500TWh/year by 2050, up from 3900TWh in 2017.

However, that is only half the picture. Despite the significant growth in cooling equipment stock, much of the world will remains considerably under-served compared with the most advanced nations. Put another way, even with some 9.5 billion cooling appliances in use by 2050 this will not be sufficient to deliver universal access to cooling, let alone meet targets to reach the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.

Without ‘Cooling for All’, food and medicine loss in the supply chain will be high; food poisoning from lack of domestic temperature management will be significant; farmers will lack market connectivity, hundreds of millions of people will not have safe, let alone comfortable, living or working environments; medical centres will not have temperature-controlled services for post-natal care, etc.

We have a problem.

Effective refrigeration is essential to preserve food and medicine. It underpins industry and economic growth, is key to sustainable urbanisation as well as providing a ladder out of rural poverty. It increasingly makes much of the world bearable - or even safe - to live in. But the growth of artificial cooling will create massive demand for energy and, unless we can reduce our need for cooling and roll out solutions for clean and sustainable cooling provision, this will cause high levels of CO₂e and pollution.

As an indication of the impact of widespread global access to cooling, at the University of Birmingham we have looked at scenarios where the world has “Cooling for All”. The number of cooling appliances rises to more than 14bn. Even assuming accelerated technology progress projections delivering aggressive energy performance improvements, the energy requirement still equates to 15,500 TWh which is approx. 2.5x the 6,300 TWh maximum sector allocation envisaged by the IEA 2 degrees scenario.

To achieve the required amount of cooling within the energy budget available would require us to double the efficiency of our cooling devices on average, in addition to the technology progress proposed currently. Alternatively to “green” this volume of electricity would require more than 50% of the total projected renewables capacity for all demands from transport to industry to our cities under the IEA’s 2°C Scenario.

The world must not solve a social crisis by creating an environmental catastrophe; we need to ensure access to affordable cooling with minimum environmental impact and maximum efficient use of natural and waste resources.

If cooling is to be sustainable, then we need more efficient air-conditioners and fridges, but this is not enough. We must also see a fundamental overhaul of the way cooling is provided.

The Cold Economy is the development of cohesive and integrated system-level strategies to mitigate and meet cooling needs sustainably within our climate change, natural resource and clean air targets, while supporting economy growth. 

This involves understanding the multiple cooling needs and the size and location of the thermal, waste and wrong-time energy resources to define the step-change novel energy vectors, thermal stores, clean cooling technologies and novel business models, policy and societal interventions to optimally integrate those resources and cooling needs through self-organising systems.

Core to this is using surplus cold and heat. For example, we should harness the cold energy of liquefied natural gas (LNG) along with industrial waste heat and low-grade geothermal energy. By 2025, we shall be throwing away $bns of waste cold from LNG alone, primarily into the sea.

To achieve the necessary step change, we need to start by asking ourselves a new question. No longer ‘how much green electricity do we need to generate?’ but rather ‘what is the service we require, and how can we provide it in the least damaging way?’

Given the urgency and magnitude of the challenge and the multi-partner and multi-disciplinary research and delivery mechanisms required, to lead this work we urge the establishment of a multi-disciplinary Centre of Excellence for Clean Cooling (CEfCC) to bring the global expertise together to research and develop the step-change pathways for achieving sustainable cooling while meeting social and economic cooling needs. 

By Toby Peters / Professor in Cold Economy, University of Birmingham, UK

Even within some of the world’s largest and most sophisticated companies, you find that teams responsible for sustainability reporting are often left out on a limb.

Where hundreds of thousands are spent on smart customer relationship and supply chain software, or advanced marketing analytics, it is still not uncommon to find global environmental data being crunched on a clunky old spreadsheet.

Better business intelligence enables better business decisions. However, most organisations do not track environmental data such as carbon emission or water use when looking at how to optimise business efficiency. 

In theory doing this should provide an excellent lens to look at overall efficiency across different locations and processes. This can highlight where equipment is not operating as expected, or inefficient procedures that result in energy or water waste. It also provides the evidence necessary to make a robust business case for investing into new or upgraded technologies.

But in practice, data on sustainability metrics is all too often lumped together once a year for the sake of annual reporting, which ends up being the sole purpose for its collection.

Part of the problem is that sustainability data can come from any area of the business, from different teams and in different formats. It can therefore be difficult to consolidate the data in a way that provides useful information across the organisation.

However, this is all starting to change. Companies are taking increasingly integrated approaches to data, finding ways to bring sustainability metrics into their wider evaluation of performance.

This shift is being unlocked by the same driving forces that are behind the rise of the Internet of Things: cheaper meters and sensors to collect information, alongside the ability to access and aggregate large quantities of data in smarter ways. It is getting easier and easier to combine disparate and disorganised pieces of information, to automate the cleaning of the data, and to report this in an organised fashion.

Software plays an important role in enabling effective decisions to be made using this data. Traditionally, bespoke sustainability software had to be developed, often over a long period of time. But the rise and improvement of all purpose Business Intelligence (BI) software has meant that organisations can now create highly tailored BI solutions, which in many cases are just as powerful and useful as many tailored sustainability software solutions. 

In fact, BI solutions can sometimes offer visualisations of data that have more impact and insight than traditional sustainability software. This is because sustainability teams have the ability to customise the outputs themselves, rather than always relying on software developers for every small change. 

Beyond this, BI solutions are supported by some of the world’s largest software companies, and can integrate with an organisation’s existing IT software license. The prime example of this is Microsoft’s suite of BI software. 

One example of putting this into practice is finding ways to improve approaches to employee business travel, which is often a large source of costs and carbon emissions. Standard BI software can connect directly to raw data on travel, refreshing whenever this is updated or new information is added. And this can all be done online, so it is immediately accessible.

The data collected can be readily displayed and broken down, so it can be visualised at multiple levels. For example, you can view emissions by time period, operating company, business units, teams, individuals, travel modes, class of ticket, or any combination of the aforementioned options.

By being able to look right down to specific departure airports and even individual employees, this allows companies to make smarter decisions about travel policies and ask the right questions that can result in substantial cost savings.

The same is true with vehicle telematics, especially larger vehicles, such as those used in construction and mining. With very large vehicles driver behaviour can make a huge difference to fuel costs for the same amount of work being done. These fuel costs can be higher than labour costs for the drivers, so the information can be used to create incentive schemes to improve behaviour, or as a way of targeting training programmes. 

There are even ways to use these advanced approaches to sustainability data to drive the growth of business units, so long as the right metrics and methodologies are applied. A number of ICT companies, such as BT and AT&T, are now working towards goals for how their products and services are enabling their customers to reduce carbon emissions in their own operations.

It is only through good measurement that sustainability issues can truly be managed effectively. The sooner that clunky old spreadsheets are put into retirement – whether through specialist sustainability software or BI solutions – the better the outcomes will be for the planet. 

Check out the online HTML CheatSheet here and save the link because you might need it while composing content for a web page.

By John Hsu / The Carbon Trust