A Global Solutions Network

Today’s mega-cities, for example, already have to confront dangerous heat waves, rising sea levels, more extreme storms, dire congestion, and air and water pollution. Agricultural regions already need to become more resilient in the face of increased climate volatility. And as one region in one part of the world designs a better way to manage its transport, energy needs, water supplies, or food supplies, those successes should quickly become part of the global knowledge base, enabling other regions to benefit rapidly as well.

Universities have a special role to play in the new UN knowledge network. Exactly 150 years ago, in 1862, Abraham Lincoln created America’s land-grant universities to help local communities to improve farming and the quality of life through science. Today, we need universities in all parts of the world to help their societies face the challenges of poverty reduction, clean energy, sustainable food supplies, and the rest. By linking together, and putting their curricula online, the world’s universities can become even more effective in discovering and promoting science-based solutions to complex problems.

The world’s corporate sector also has a significant role to play in sustainable development. Now the corporate sector has two faces. It is the repository of cutting-edge sustainable technologies, pioneering research and development, world-class management, and leadership in environmental sustainability. Yet at the same time, the corporate sector lobbies aggressively to gut environmental regulations, slash corporate-tax rates, and avoid their own responsibility for ecological destruction. Sometimes the same company operates on both sides of the divide.

We urgently need far-sighted companies to join the Sustainable Development Solutions Network. These companies are uniquely placed to move new ideas and technologies into early-stage demonstration projects, thereby accelerating global learning cycles. Equally important, we need a critical mass of respected corporate leaders to press their peers to cease the anti-environmental lobbying and campaign-finance practices that account for the inaction of governments.

Sustainable development is a generational challenge, not a short-term task. The reinvention of energy, food, transport, and other systems will take decades, not years. But the long-term nature of this challenge must not lull us into inaction. We must start reinventing our productive systems now, precisely because the path of change will be so long and the environmental dangers are already so pressing.

At the Rio+20 Summit this past June, the world’s governments agreed to adopt a new set of goals on sustainable development for the period after 2015, to build upon the Millennium Development Goals’ success in reducing poverty, hunger, and disease. In the post-2015 era, the fight against poverty and the fight to protect the environment will go hand in hand, reinforcing each other. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has already initiated several global processes to help establish the new post-2015 goals in an open, participatory, and knowledge-based way.

The Secretary General’s launch of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network is therefore especially timely. Not only will the world adopt a new set of goals to achieve sustainable development, but it will also have a new global network of expertise to help achieve those vital objectives.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is Professor of Economics and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is also Special Adviser to United Nations Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2012.

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