Sustainable Development Goals

What are the Sustainable Development Goals?

The Sustainable Development Goals are a set of global priorities for ensuring that economic, environmental, social and cultural wellbeing is achieved for everyone around the world. They are ambitious goals for governments across the world to achieve, but there is a lot we can do at Scouts and at home to support them.

Who decided on the goals?

In 2000 the UN agreed eight Millennium Development Goals with the aim to work towards tackling issues of the time – extreme poverty, education, gender equality, child mortality, maternal health, AIDS /HIV and other diseases, environmental issues and global partnerships. Some of the goals were met, like to halve the proportion of people living on less than $1 a day, but to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger is far from being achieved – 800 million people still live in extreme poverty! Therefore, new goals were developed. In 2015, after consulting millions of people and organisations across the world, the final decision about what the goals would be was made by the governments of the United Nations.

Why are the goals important?

The goals aim to end poverty, protect the planet and try to make sure that everyone around the world is living comfortably.  All very important and worthwhile goals to work towards! Each goal has specific targets for governments to achieve over the next 14 years. In Scouts, we can help to support the meeting of these targets.

How can you play your part in achieving these goals?

Scouts Scotland have put together a series of programme ideas to raise awareness of the Goals and run activities within your Scout Group to tackles some of the goals.  This can be downloaded here :