Southern Alberta Council on Public Affairs (SACPA)

Five years ago, in 2015, the governments of the United Nations agreed on a set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that we would need to attain by 2030 to make life better and more sustainable for future generations. Our governments had come to accept that we were rapidly overpopulating the planet, depleting our natural resources and destroying our environment. These goals cover the full range of socio-economic and environmental factors that our governments agreed were essential for our peace, wellbeing and prosperity. They called these goals our 2030 Agenda. Since then, a wave of populist nationalism has swept much of the globe. Support for the multilateral approach, which has kept most of the world at peace since World War II, is in decline. Foreign aid, which governments agreed in 2015 would need to be boosted in order to help developing countries attain their SDGs, is down. And global hunger, exacerbated increasingly by climate shocks, is up, causing mounting numbers of desperate people to leave t