Achieving the 2030 Agenda is essential to peace and stability worldwide, and is becoming an important point of reference for foreign policy. As European Sustainable Development Week launches across Europe, European embassies in Berlin are engaging with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and raising awareness about the entire sustainable development agenda among foreign policy communities.
Today, European Sustainable Development Week gets underway across Europe. Aiming to promote action on the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the week’s various activities highlight sustainability as an issue that concerns everyone, from citizens to local policymakers to business. The ambitious, universal and transformative targets are relevant to all of humankind and, as such, can only be met by working together.
Foreign policy is an important player too, not only for implementing SDG 16 (peace, justice and strong institutions) but also for making progress across the entire multi-coloured spectrum of goals. For instance, if water is not sufficiently available to meet basic human needs and underpin socio-economic development (SDG 6), that impedes development and fuels displacement and conflict risks, posing significant risks for stability and prosperity. In turn, foreign policy can transform water conflicts through active water diplomacy. Transboundary cooperation initiated by diplomats is often essential for regional stability, and a precondition for sustainably and equitably managing the water-energy-food nexus.
Deforestation and unsustainable land management (addressed under SDG 15) undermine millions of livelihoods, and contribute to resource-related disputes and social grievances. Over the last 60 years, 40 to 60 % of internal armed conflicts in Africa have been linked to natural resources and these pressures are compounded by inefficient land tenure systems. When pursuing peace – i.e. building up institutions, capacities and norms in conflict-affected or post-conflict countries – foreign policy can factor in these land issues by promoting land reforms and participatory management, investing in land restoration, and facilitating cooperation across borders and ministries. Furthermore, foreign policy communities can adapt their general security strategies and migration policies, and thus establish measures to prevent the emergence of tensions in the first place.
Some countries have started incorporating the SDGs into their foreign policy strategies, either as part of their peacebuilding activities or within conflict prevention. For example, Switzerland has adopted this approach, given its aims to prevent the long-term causes of violent conflict through both bilateral and multilateral international cooperation.
The SDGs’ strong links with external action priorities, such as conflict prevention, have been recognized in the Sustaining Peace Agenda. Research has provided insights on natural resources, climate change and fragility, as well as on environmental peacebuilding, and established a solid foundation to understand these links. Of course, foreign policy initiatives in those areas were advancing well before the advent of the SDGs. Yet, to date, the discourse on the positive and negative impacts of the SDGs on peace and stability has been dispersed. We are still only at the beginning of understanding the foreign policy implications of the Agenda 2030.
During the European Sustainable Development Week, ten European embassies based in Berlin will engage with the SDGs. At the initiative of the German Federal Foreign Office, the embassies are organising events on single goals relevant to their country under the slogan “Diplomacy for Sustainability”. For instance, the Embassy of Hungary is convening a meeting on water and biodiversity, with representatives of foreign and development ministries to discuss sustainable development in the water sector, water management and the challenges of biodiversity in natural waters (SDG 15). Other embassies are looking at other goals, including SDG 14 (marine life), SDG 11 (sustainable urban development) and SDG 7 (clean and affordable energy).
The activities this week in Berlin are a welcome step towards assembling foreign policy makers behind the SDGs, increasing knowledge, exchanging on threats and solutions, and engaging new players in the debates surrounding the Agenda 2030.
To fight illegal coca plantations and conflict actors’ income sources, Colombia’s president wants to loosen the ban on aerial glyphosate spraying. However, considering the dynamics of organised crime, the use of toxic herbicides will not only fail to achieve its aim, it will have many adverse effects for the environment and human health, fundamentally undermining ways to reach peace in the country. International cooperation and national policy-makers need to account for this peace spoiler.
As India grapples with the worsening impacts of climate change, the need to strengthen its adaptation efforts has become more significant than ever. Climate diplomacy and mainstreaming climate adaptation into the most vulnerable sectors could provide some solutions to overcoming barriers, such as the lack of sustainable funding.
“Climate Security risks will materialise in very different ways and forms, whether we talk about Lake Chad or about the Arctic, Bangladesh and the Small Island Developing States,” said the EU’s Ambassador to the United Nations in New York, Joao Vale de Almeida, in his opening remarks. “But for the EU, there is no doubt, as underlined in 2016 in our Global Strategy, and reaffirmed by the 28 Ministers of Foreign Affairs, that climate change is a major threat to the security of the EU and to global peace and security more generally,” he said.
The challenges facing the international community are growing while the willingness to cooperate seems to be waning. Foreign policy must help bridge this gap. One way to accomplish this is by pushing forward a major achievement of multilateralism: the 2030 Agenda and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals. At a side event during the 2019 High-Level Political Forum, diplomats and policy experts discussed the role of foreign policy in the global sustainability architecture.