The goals are 17 global objectives designed to create a more equitable and sustainable planet by 2030. Millions of people around the world provided input on the goals, which were adopted by the international community in 2015. The commitments are reflected in CMU's own longstanding efforts on sustainability and addressing society's most pressing needs.
3 comments:
I think it’s wonderful that Carnegie Mellon University started this initiative and hopefully it will inspire all students to continue to value sustainability and strive for that in their respective fields. I think a lot of other universities will be following in their footsteps. It’s very timely as well, with all the fires on the west coast people are being forced to take an active stance against climate change. I believe every institution From large corporations to schools should have a plan like this and be consistently striving to reduce waste and emissions and use more sustainable materials. I’ve been thinking about this in relation to theatre production for a few years now. I am very conscious of the paint we are washing down the drain and the amount of wood we are using. In my future work I wasn’t to strive to reuse materials on hand and opt for more sustainable alternatives to certain materials. I also thought it was very important that CMU addressed that this 17 point plan was only the beginning but there’s a lot more work to be done
To me, the most exciting thing about CMU's plan is the inclusion of the word "voluntary". It shows that CMU is committed to making these changes and keeps them as a forefront in their plans, especially in times like these when environmental sustainability has become more and more important to institutions across the world. Seeing Kathleen McLaughlin on the list of speakers piqued my interest, when it comes to this. She is executive vice president of Walmart as a whole, an enterprise than many think of as sort of a megacorporation. In my eyes, their sustainability plan is more important to the world at large than CMU's, purely because of their size. It's even more exciting, then, to see them at this event, because it means that they may be actively taking steps toward the kind of sustainability that CMU has set the precedent for. The same applies for the state of Hawaii, seeing the Governor and a Senator on the speaking list. Having these two (Walmart and the State of Hawaii) adopt a voluntary review like CMU could have lasting global effects if done properly.
So this article really felt like a lot of patting of the back for CMU’s review of the Sustainable Development goals rather than really discussing the goals themselves or the action being taken. They did loosely talk about their approach of the subject including a discussion around committee set-up and numbers but I was really hoping to look at the goals themselves and what they meant for the CMU community as a whole and the article didn’t even list the goals they had. I think it was a missed opportunity to give the goals of the project more attention and undermined the work they were doing on some level to have a fairly large article that didn’t detail the actual work itself. I would assume the work is fairly significant because they kept reiterating how the university should act as a model for other universities to base their own process for handling sustainable development goals around. Don’t get me wrong the work is important and I’m glad CMU is taking the initiative but I could do with a more substantive article in place of the back patting.
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