QUESTION: Among the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations, which is the most achievable?

ANSWER: The very poor need assistance to get out of poverty. Sustainability is an issue in rich and growing societies where the question is whether their growth and lifestyle can continue in the long run given environmental constraints. That numnut UN bureaucrats have inserted this issue in the UNDP’s mandate of relieving poverty implies only that UN bureaucrats are just bureaucrats who love fancy phrases and need to serve their own bureaucratic interests and not that there is some rational explanation for confusing the job of fighting poverty with that of sustainability of economic growth and prosperity. Details in the document linked below.

LINKTO RELATED POST O SDG: https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/03/06/sdg/

EXCERPT: Implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) marks a shift in the priority of the UNDP from its primary purpose and function of tackling poverty to a UNEP and UNFCCC task of tackling climate change. This shift erodes the ability of the UNDP to perform its primary function of providing development assistance to poor countries and creates a vacuum in the United Nation’s poverty eradication program. We have learned from the poor performance of Cold-War-era development plans that combining the strategic interests of the donor (fighting communism) with the needs of the poor (economic and human development) do not mix. Yet, the SDG is just such a confounded and conflicted racist “White Man’s Burden” development program because it combines the strategic needs of the donor with respect to climate change with the most modest of needs of the very poor. From an SDG perspective, an important consideration is the environmental constraint on economic growth which holds that human development is not necessarily a good thing because it comes at the expense of environmental degradation, finite resource depletion, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and climate change. In this equation, optimality exists only when human development is constrained by environmental considerations. Imposition of these values of the rich North on the poor SOUTH is an egregious form of racism.