The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015, provides a shared blueprint for prosperity and peace to individuals and the planet, now and then future. At its heart are the 17 Sustainable Developments Goals (SDGs), which can be an urgent call for action from all nations developed and developing in a global partnership. They recognize that end poverty along with other deprivations have to go hand-in-hand with different strategies that can improve health and education, reduce inequality, and spur financial growth handling climate change and work to conserve our oceans and forests.

The SDGs framework built on years of work by the UN and its partner nations, including the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs.In June 1992, at the Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, over 178 nations adopted Agenda 21, a comprehensive action plan to build a global partnership for development to improve human life and safeguard the environment.The Member States unanimously adopted the Millennium Declaration at the Millennium Summit in September 2000 at UN Headquarters in New York. The Summit led to the elaboration of eight Millennium Development Goals to reduce extreme poverty by 2015.

The Johannesburg Declaration on Sustainable Development and the Plan of Implementation, adopted at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in South Africa in 2002, reaffirmed the global community’s commitments to poverty eradication and the environment and assembled on Agenda 21 and the Millennium Declaration by adding more focus on multilateral partnerships.

At the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2012, member states adopted the outcome document titles as “The future we want”. Where they chose, inter alia, to launch a process to develop a set of SDGs to build upon the MDGs and also to establish the UN High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development. The Rio +20 outcome also contained other measures for implementing sustainable development, including mandates for future programmes of work in development financing, small island developing states and more. In 2013, the General Assembly set up a 30 member Open Working Group to develop a proposal on the SDGs.

In January 2015, the General Assembly began the negotiation process on the post-2015 development agenda. The process culminated in the subsequent adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, with 17 SDGs at its core, at the UN Sustainable Development Summit in September 2015. That year was a landmark year for multilateralism and international policy shaping, with the adoption of several major agreements such as Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015) and Addis Ababa Action Agenda on Financing for Development (2015). The annual High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development serves as the central UN platform for the follow-up and review of the SDGs.

Today the Division for Sustainable Development Goals at the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs provides considerable support and capacity building for the SDGs and their related thematic issues, which includes water, energy, climate, oceans, urbanization, transport, science and technology, the Global Sustainable Development Report, partnerships and small island developing States.

To be able to make the 2030 Agenda a reality, broad ownership of the SDGs must translate into a strong commitment by all stakeholders to implement the common objectives. DSDG intends to help facilitate this participation.Sustainable Stories is a platform telling those socially impacting actions of corporations around the world. All types of projects which are aiming to achieve the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals are told at Sustainability Stories.