Bernhard Wehrli and Omar Kassab

This year, our team at ETH Zurich launched the third edition of the public lecture series on “The Sustainable Development Goals in Context”.  Our planet is in crisis – ice caps are melting, fires are destroying tropical forests. On top of that, we are witnessing multiple humanitarian crises. To focus our attention to positive change, the United Nations declared the 2020ies the “Decade of Action” towards sustainability. Because we are curious to learn how to trigger positive change, this lecture series starts a conversation between students, practitioners, and faculty to explore pioneering developments for a more sustainable future.

Fire near the Branco River in the Jaci-Parana Extractive Reserve, in Porto Velho, Rondonia state, Brazil in August 2020. Picture Christian Braga/Greenpeace.

Students and participants will learn how ETH Zurich and other universities develop knowledge and technologies for achieving the SDGs. We commit ourselves to sustainable development in our research, teaching, learning and daily life. Specifically, we will train our skills to communicate knowledge and insights in the sustainability context.

The six transformations

The 2030 Agenda of the United Nations is quite abstract in that it consists of 17 broad goals such as “Zero Hunger” (SDG 2) or “Sustainable Cities and Communities” (SDG 11).To provide an actionable framework, the 17 SDGs are split into 169 targets, that are further broken down into 231 measurable indicators (IISD, 2022). This diversity of goals and targets, many of which are intricately interrelated, can be overwhelming for stakeholders and policy makers. In order to focus on a coherent set of policy fields, a group of scientists proposed six SDG transformations (Sachs et al. 2019). Exploring the SDGs through the lens of these six transformations helps students and other participants to understand the very complex system of criteria, measures, and goals involved. From a formal point of view, this framework allows us to dedicate two sessions to each of the six transformations over the course of the 14-week semester (including one introductory and one concluding session). Content wise, we can easily map the topics to active areas of teaching and research (Table 1). Finally, the orientation of the six transformations towards action offers plenty of room for conversations with practitioners from business, policy, NGOs and civil society.

Table 1 – Mapping the six SDG transformations with fields of scientific research and development 

 A growing community

Last year, during the second editions of the series, we had 114 students actively participating. In the form of a blog post, they presented a topic of their choice as a contribution to one of the six transformations. This year, we are looking forward to 12 keynotes by experts from ETH and other universities and about 30 speakers and panelists will offer their points of view on how to transform our society, economy and technology for a more sustainable future. Building such a dynamic web of practitioners from many fields, from different cultural backgrounds and at diverse stages of their career has been motivating our team to develop this lecture series from one edition to the next.

Sources

IISD, International Institute for Sustainable Development, 2022. SDG Knowledge Hub. Retrieved on: Feb 24. 2022

Sachs, J. D., Schmidt-Traub, G., Mazzucato, M., Messner, D., Nakicenovic, N., & Rockstrom, J. (2019). Six Transformations to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Nature Sustainability, 2(9), 805-814. doi:10.1038/s41893-019-0352-9