Sustainable Development Goals and the 2030 Agenda: Why Environmental Sustainability and Gender Equality are so important to Reducing Poverty and Inequalities - UNEP Perspectives Issue No. 17

On September 25th 2015, the Heads of States of the UN’s 193 member states adopted the “2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” and its 17 “Sustainable Development Goals. This is the result of two policy processes that have merged, namely the sustainable development process, which was developed following the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992, and the development process, with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) at its core. One of the main outcomes of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (“Rio+20”), which was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in June 2012, was the launch of a process to develop a set of universal goals and targets to address economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development, and to merge the Rio process with the “MDG” process.