Urban planning and development in Africa has been fraught with many challenges. A study of Accra and Nairobi provides some lessons on what needs to improve.
An Egyptian engineer at work on a project to upgrade the Suez Canal. Engineers will be crucial in making the sustainable development goals a reality.
Amr Dalsh/Reuters
If we want the Sustainable Development Goals to be more than just big dreams, Africa will need well trained engineers who can put their skills to good use in their own communities.
Projects are underway to address sustainable energy transitions in cities like Uganda’s Kasese.
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Renewable energy programmes in South Africa need stronger policies to ensure that communities benefit.
Low carbon choices such as solar power are essential for the African continent, if it intends to stop the harmful global warming effects.
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After two years of negotiations, the UN Sustainable Development goals will be adopted today. How can society and government actually end poverty and achieve other lofty goals?
Businesses should definitely be involved in sustainable development, but watch out for ‘greenwash’.
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Have the Sustainable Development Goals been co-opted by big business?
The Sustainable Development Goals include targets to end child marriages and female genital mutilation. Tahani (in pink) married when she was 6 - nearly half of all women in Yemen were married as children.
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James Whitmore, The Conversation e Emil Jeyaratnam, The Conversation
The 17 Sustainable Development Goals explained in charts.
Improving maternal mortality and ending preventable deaths in children are some of the health targets in the Sustainable Development Goals.
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Health has secured its place as one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. But without clear mechanisms to report, finance or engage other sectors, could more end up as less?
Here’s a goal: no new coal mines.
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By championing economic growth, the Sustainable Development Goals are a barely disguised defence of the market fundamentalism that underpins business-as-usual. But in an age of planetary limits, sustained economic growth is not the solution to our social and environmental ills, but their cause.
Good governance is a foundation for sustainable development under the new goals.
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Later this week, world leaders will gather at the United Nations in New York and adopt a set of Sustainable Development Goals to guide global development.
Australia’s prodigious coal output is one of the factors that count against it in a new appraisal of sustainability among OECD nations.
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A survey of OECD nations puts Australia 18th out of 34 on progress towards the world’s new sustainability goals. It scores well on quality of life, but lets itself down on - you guessed it - climate.
The ‘linear economy’ that drove 20th-century leaps in wealth is no longer sustainable, and our standard of living will not survive without a dramatic redesign.
Digging up that nature strip and planting tomatoes is one way of reducing consumption.
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What does your vision of a sustainable future look like? Some people imagine a world where technology solves the world’s most pressing environmental problems.
Millions of people in Africa don’t have access to adequate sanitation.
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Despite improvements, there are still millions of people without adequate sanitation in Africa. Sustainable solutions that can be replicated elsewhere are being developed in South Africa.
The Kariba dam on the Zambezi River produces most of the electricity used in Zimbabwe and Zambia, supports extensive fishing and tourism industries and protects hundreds of thousands of people from floods.
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China’s formal climate target shows that the world’s largest greenhouse emitter is determined to green its economy on an unprecedented scale - and that it can bring the rest of the world along for the ride.
Professor of Global Change and Sustainability Research Institute and School of Animal, Plant and Environmental Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand