6 Jun 2018
Not keeping up with sustainability goals
Nearly three years ago, Canada along with other members of the United Nations agreed on 17 sustainable development goals and 169 specific targets for the post-2015 UN development agenda. These included ending poverty and hunger, ensuring equity, promoting sustainable patterns of consumption and production, and protecting and managing the natural resource base of economic and social development. According to a report by the Ottawa-based McLeod Group, it’s hard to know how we are doing. The report says Canada has yet to produce a national framework setting out how it will reach the sustainable development goals. McLeod Group cites a report published last fall by the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. saying that Canada did not have data on 108 of 169 sustainable development targets. Where data existed, the country was only on track for 17.