>> Thanks very much, Mogens.

It's a great honor to be able

to speak to you about the SDGs. >> Thank you, very much. >> The UN agenda 2030 with its
SDGs, is built up upon, but further develops

the understanding of global sustainable development which was introduced by

the World Commission on Environment and Development. Established by the U.N.

General Secretary and led by the former Norwegian Prime

Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland. The Commission's report came in 1987 and is published as a
book with

the title Our Common Future. Popularly, however, it is usually

called the Brundtland Report. The Brundtland Report made

two very important points. Firstly, it emphasized the importance

of intergenerational equity. In other words, the report argued that

we must not, through our resource use, today, lower potential living

standards of future generations. Secondly, the Brundtland Report argued

that sustainable development must include, in addition to consideration

of economic sustainability, also environmental and

social sustainability. At the time of the Brundtland Report,

however, it was not really possible to define what was meant by

environmental and social sustainability. The past 30 years has brought us

much closer to an understanding of these two sustainability components. And they've been
specified in many of

the sustainable development goals. In essence, environmental sustainability

requires that the human demand for resources is brought to and maintained within the global

supply of these resources. And social sustainability demands that

certain basal human rights are respected. I recommend that you go

to the UN SDG website and familiarize yourself with the 17 goals. Associated with each goal,

you will find relevant facts and a number of subgoals or targets. Please take some time to
study

them before the next lecture. [MUSIC]

There are 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Many argue that it's too many, and indeed, 17 is
a pretty unwieldy number for any country or organization to work with. Some argue, as well,
that the goals may be internally inconsistent. We need to remember, however, that the SDGs
were agreed through political negotiation and are the product of compromise. As the
negotiation process neared completion in 2015, some actually called for decreasing the
number of goals. But it would have been impossible to agree on what goals to drop as all, of
course, have strong proponents. We are left then with 17 goals, each with a number of
subgoals or targets. In all, the SDGs are comprised of 169 targets. Having targets, of course,
gives no meaning unless we have the possibility to measure progress against them. Therefore,
indicators have been identified for each target that can be used to assess their global status.
Here, we see the indicators identified for SDG number one. In total, 230 indicators have been
identified for monitoring status of progress against the 17 SDGs. These indicators represent
the best methodology we have available today. But many need to be further developed,
perhaps even changed to something entirely different in order to effectively measure global
progress against the SDGs. And for essentially all targets, we're missing data from many parts
of the world. Therefore, there needs to be a focus on both metric development and data
collection in order to accurately assess global progress against the SDGs. Under SDG 17, there's
actually a target aimed at developing new measures for assessing sustainable growth. By 2030,
build on existing initiatives to develop measurements of progress on sustainable development
that complement gross domestic product and support statistical capacity building in
developing countries. The lack of quantitative metrics for measuring the SDGs is actually
serving as a kind of catalyst in focusing research to develop metrics that can be applied to
assess sustainability. To illustrate this, I've invited two researchers from vastly different
disciplines to tell us about the work they have underway and how it can be applied to the
SDGs. My first guest is Professor Peter Birch Sorensen from the University of Copenhagen.
Peter is a professor in Environmental Economics. Peter there's an SDG that actually focuses on
economic growth and and usually, we measure economic growth by using GDP. But what
exactly is GDP? Well, GDP stands for gross domestic products. So it's a measure of you can say,
economic activity, mainly market activity plus activity in the public sector. How does it relate to
sustainability or does it relate to sustainability? Well, not really. There's a clear relation
between GDP and the material standard of living. But the problem is that the GDP does not
account for the costs to the environment of economic activity. But that's, of course, why in the
agenda 2030, it actually states that we need something to supplement GDP. What would
happen for example after a hurricane, when you rebuild after a hurricane? Wouldn't that have
a tendency to increase GDP? Yeah, for a while, because there would be extra construction
activity to repair the buildings and roads and bridges and dams and so on. But we claim that's
improvement. That's obviously not an improvement in our welfare. It's just the cost of
restoring, getting us back to the point where we came from. That just shows a GDP suits not be
taken as an indicator of human welfare. And the economists who invented the concepts never
considered to be an indicator of welfare. Human welfare also depends on a lot of other things