90-896 Policy Topics: Sustainable Development
6 units, Carnegie Mellon University
In September 2015, the United Nations General Assembly approved The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which establish an ambitious set of goals for achieving development progress in a prescribed time frame. The Sustainable Development Goals SDGs represent the latest effort by the international community to encourage and facilitate broadbased progress across multiple sectors in individual countries. The SDGs reflect an optimists perspective regarding international development. Optimists highlight the tremendous progress in improving the quality of human life that has been made during the past 200 years, and in particular since the end of World War II. Building on this record, achieving the SDGs will mark a notable step forward in addressing the most serious inequities that exist across the globe, including extreme poverty, food insecurity, illiteracy, and inadequate health care. SDGs aside, pessimists worry about the enormous challenges currently confronting the international community. They note that by 2050 global population will reach 9.6 billion people. To feed an increasingly affluent number of people, we will need 70 percent more food production and a doubling of available water and arable land, which will come at the expense of existing natural systems. The availability of these essential inputs is further complicated by the reality that the planet is undergoing vast biological and physical changes due to climate change and environmental degradation. Human communities are changing as well. More than 50 percent of the worlds population live in urban areas and 75 percent of the worlds largest cities will be found in the developing world over the next few decades. These megaurban areas create their own challenges from the spread of pandemic diseases, to sanitation, to energy needs. Please see the Heinz College course catalog for the more httpsapi.heinz.cmu.educoursesapicoursedetail90896
Prerequisites: none listed
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