Today marks the end of the class on the SDGs that we have been running at Clark Memorial High School since September 2020. This class was not about memorizing the 17 goals of the SDGs but about learning how to imagine the future by doing backcasting, a basic concept of the SDGs.
We actually finished the class today, and there were many things we could improve. One of them is the way the updated 5-step practice treats the vision as a direction. Initially, the rapid creation of a vision was not something that someone could just do on a whim, as you can see by looking up how the Impressionists came about. So replacing it with direction or aspect was the right transformation.
There are many other things, but if I were to do it next year, I would try to take these Five Steps at the heart of everything I do and explain them. The difference between the MDGs and the SDGs can be clearly shown by using this diagram.
The Millennium Development Goals or MDGs are the predecessors of the SDGs. The MDGs are a set of eight goals: poverty and hunger, which are still part of the SDGs, and ones for more developing countries, such as educating primary school children and keeping pregnant women healthy. SDGs have 17 goals, which in turn have 169 targets. This is too many, and I think politically it was not possible to remove them and focus on them a little bit more, but I think it is also true that if we think of the environment, society and economy as a framework of caring capacity, we have to solve activities in different areas at the same time.
The relationship between the MDGs and SDGs can be represented in the diagram, i.e. from a developed countries' perspective. Comparing them in terms of time, the MGDs are the baseline for developed countries to start something new, as they have already been solved, while the SDGs are the rules of the future, which will be the basis of politics and economics for people all over the world.
And if you compare them at the level of achievement, the MDGs are clearly a state where there is something wrong, so it is clear what needs to be done without a vision. In a sense, this is like saying that the injury is the problem if you are injured and you need to fix it. On the other hand, the SDGs are about addressing issues that do not seem to have an immediate impact on health. But, if we left unchecked, SDGs issues will impact the socio-environmental economy, e.g. deforestation. At first glance, it is not always easy to see where the problem lies, so we need to have a vision of where we are going and how to reduce deforestation. The problem is the difference between what is happening now and what should be happening in the future. Therefore finding the problem is different from finding the MDGs to fix an injury.
The MDG solutions, if I may be so bold, are the ones that bring the negative back to zero, like the nutrients and drips you get when you're injured. You are lying in the hospital; the SDG solutions are the ones that are like Red Bull, the energy drinks that bring the zero to the positive. I think.
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