Opinion: This must be a ’1968 moment’ for sustainable development

Universities may think they have more pressing priorities than the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), but they don't, say Martha McPherson and Dr Kate Roll (Both UCL Institute for Innovation & Public Purpose). At UCL's recent Beyond Boundaries conference on the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, listeners may have been surprised to hear panelists refer to this as a "1968 moment" for the SDGs. With Covid and widespread economic hardship on the front pages, are we really likely to see new enthusiasm for the 17 goals, which were universally adopted in 2015? But perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. The turbulence and civil unrest we associate with the 1960s, which led to radical innovation in legal norms, institutions and the ways we organise our societies, seem very familiar today. Now, however, all our crucial challenges relate to sustainability and inequality. "Covid is an SDG crisis," as Aromar Revi from the Indian Institute of Human Settlements put it at the conference. The pandemic is a health crisis (SDG 3), but it is intimately bound up with questions of environmental degradation (SDGs 6, 14 and 16), urbanisation and dense living (SDG 11).