Dubai: The first State of Sustainability Report — UAE 2016 is the first of many steps toward achieving a series of life-improvement goals adopted by 193 countries under the United Nations, said officials.
The new report was released by Dubai Carbon Centre of Excellence on Wednesday at the World Government Summit and strives to meet 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) ranging from eradicating poverty and improving education to providing clean water for all.
An 80-page document filled with a wide range of expert views and opinions on best paths to reaching maximum sustainability, the report was issued at the close of the three-day summit attended by 3,000 delegates from 125 countries.
Waleed Salman, chairman of Dubai Carbon, said the report is “an important milestone” for the UAE and will complement similar efforts already under way in the UAE for the last few years.
The centre worked with several federal ministries to prepare what will become an annual reporting mechanism on the success of the UAE towards meeting its SDGs, said Salman.
“We need to talk to the world, this is the knowledge we can share with friends around the world,” Salman told reporters at a press conference at the summit. “We’re going to make this a knowledge project so that we can showcase what the UAE is doing until 2021.”
Salman told Gulf News that the UAE will build upon the sustainability goals in years to come not only to improve life at home in the country but also to help share a better way forward with other countries.
The 17 goals encompass 169 targets and 300 indicators.
Shaikh Abdullah Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, UAE Minister of Foreign Affairs, said in a statement, “Since its founding, the UAE has been addressing sustainability issues at home and abroad. The UAE continues to play an instrumental role in promoting sustainable development and clean-energy initiatives.”
The new sustainability report is one of the ways UAE is committing to its adoption of goals as part of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted unanimously by countries in September 2015.
Each country is expected to accomplish the SDGs over the next 15 years.
The UN said in an earlier statement on the historic SDG summit that it is aiming to “address the needs of people in both developed and developing countries”, emphasising that no one should be left behind. Broad and ambitious in scope, the Agenda addresses the three dimensions of sustainable development: social, economic and environmental, as well as important aspects related to peace, justice and effective institutions.
At a panel held earlier in the morning on Wednesday at the summit to explore putting sustainability goals into action, Jan Eliasson, deputy secretary-general of the United Nations and former Swedish prime minister, said he was optimistic about the new goals.
He said there are greater hopes for the goals because they are not top-down vertical aspirations, rather, they work on a horizontal scale — when one provides clean water, for example, that improves health, impacting another goal, and so on.
It’s inspiring, he said, that 193 countries will now “put the problem in the centre and gather around it and the division of labour”.
Joseph Muscat, Prime Minister of Malta, told panellists and delegates that he believed the new sustainability goals will help to create a new global middle class with the advent of so many life-improving goals.
“We need a global middle class that doesn’t exist so far,” Muscat said. “It’s something that we had to wait until 2015 to create a global middle class.”
Shaikha Lubna Al Qasimi, Minister of Development and International Cooperation, said sessions on the goals have already been held and questions are now being asked in order to meet the goals in the best ways possible in the UAE.
Emphasis is being placed on proper financing and monitoring as the country ramps up to meet its pledge to implement its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development commitment, she said.
