Addressing Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) within our individual capacity

By this time, I guess many of us are already aware of the sustainable development goals (SDG) set by the united nations (UN) to achieve by 2030. Before knowing much about it, I thought sustainable development goals are about only deploying sustainable technologies, which is actually a wrong definition. The most appropriate definition can be ‘Sustainable development is the development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.

Standing at this make or break moment in time regarding climate change and global warming of our planet, we all need to be very aware of them and adjust our lifestyles to counter act. Our responsible action today can save us and our future generations from this devastation. Being a global citizen, we all can contribute within our own capacity to achieve SDGs. From the definition of Sustainable development, we can realize that the way we are changing our societies and technologies is not in coherence with our planet’s ecosystem.  As our planet’s resources are limited, we need to find ways to make the optimum use of them. The most important thing is our readiness and willingness to make the right changes.

From an individual’s perspective, I think we can all be an active advocate of sustainable technology, eco-friendly lifestyles, just not in our beliefs or in our expressions but also in our practices. Within our own organization, we can always try to be creative in finding alternative solutions to save carbon, reduce plastic uses, use lesser fossil fuel-based energies and be socially inclusive. Some things that we can do easily along this line could be as follows

• Travel less by private cars, reduce road consumption by finding alternatives solutions to the task that needs to be done.
• Consume less meat, specially beefs because cows are one of the biggest producers of Carbon dioxide.
• Reduce the use of single-use plastic, for example using glass bottles rather than plastic bottles for soft drinks, using grocery bags rather than plastic bags.
• Buy clothes that are long-lasting and use them for years, we need to avoid fast fashion, as they are wasting 200 liters of freshwater per T-shirt.
• Donating more money to maintain the money flow from the rich to the poor. It will make the society more balance.
• Contribute to education, research, social works and increase awareness of climate change within our network.
• Recycle as much as we can, deploying a appropriate system around us. It just takes a little bit of thinking and effort and as a result, it can become part of our lifestyle.
• Consume less energy, even if we don’t have to pay the electric bills personally, we can try to switch off AC, fans, lights whenever not necessary
• Plant trees as much as we can and use any unused lands for that purpose.

I know all these points can be debated, the impacts might seem less from a global perspective, but hey, little by little we can make a difference, and with that vision, let’s say ‘Yes we can and we will’.