Which of the following statement/s is/are correct about Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) ?
(a) The United Nations conference on Sustainable Development was held in Rio de Janeiro in 2015.
(b) The

Question

Which of the following statement/s is/are correct about Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) ?
(a) The United Nations conference on Sustainable Development was held in Rio de Janeiro in 2015.
(b) The Sustainable Development Goals are otherwise known as the Global Goals.
(c) The SDGs Replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
(d) The SDGs came in to effect in January 2012.

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (3), statements (b) and (c). The stem prints four claims about the Sustainable Development Goals and exactly two of them survive. Statement (b) is right: the seventeen goals adopted in 2015 are routinely called the Global Goals, and the name is used by the United Nations itself and by the campaign network built around the 2030 Agenda; it is a nickname for the same list, not a rival list. Statement (c) is right too: the SDGs succeeded the eight Millennium Development Goals, which ran from 2000 to 2015 and expired at the end of that year, and the seventeen goals were written to carry the unfinished MDG agenda forward while widening it to every country rather than only the developing ones. The two statements that fail, fail on their dates, and they fail in a way worth noticing — they have swapped years with each other. Statement (a) puts the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro in 2015. The city is right and the year is not: that conference, universally called Rio+20, met at Rio de Janeiro from 20 to 22 June 2012, twenty years after the 1992 Earth Summit in the same city, and its outcome document 'The Future We Want' is what launched the intergovernmental process that eventually produced the goals. Nothing was held at Rio in 2015. Statement (d) says the SDGs came into effect in January 2012. January is right and the year is not: the goals were adopted by the General Assembly on 25 September 2015 at the Sustainable Development Summit in New York, in the resolution titled 'Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development', and they came into effect on 1 January 2016, with 2030 as the deadline. So 2012 belongs to the Rio conference and 2015 to the adoption, and the paper has printed each year against the other's event. Two true statements and two false ones leave only the option that names (b) and (c), which is option (3).

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This option is right about statement (b) and wrong to stop there. It rejects statement (c), which says the SDGs replace the Millennium Development Goals — and that is simply what happened. The eight MDGs were adopted after the Millennium Summit of September 2000 with 2015 as their target year; when that year ended the seventeen SDGs took over, having been adopted three months earlier in the same year. The relationship is one of succession and of widening: the MDGs were eight goals aimed largely at the developing world and financed substantially through aid, while the SDGs are seventeen goals with 169 targets that apply to every country, rich and poor alike, and reach into consumption, inequality, industry, cities, oceans and institutions. A candidate picks this option by treating 'replace' as too strong a word for what was really a continuation, but continuation by a new and larger framework is exactly what replacement means here.  (b) This option accepts statement (a), and statement (a) carries a wrong year. The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development met at Rio de Janeiro from 20 to 22 June 2012, not in 2015, and it is remembered as Rio+20 precisely because it fell twenty years after the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development — the Earth Summit — held in the same city, which produced Agenda 21, the Rio Declaration, the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity. What Rio+20 did was agree the outcome document 'The Future We Want' and set up an Open Working Group to draft a set of sustainable development goals; the goals themselves were adopted three years later in New York. The statement is seductive because the venue is right and Rio genuinely is the address of the SDG story, but a compound statement fails on any single wrong link, and here the link that fails is the year.  (d) This option nominates the one statement that is wrong on its central fact and rejects the two that are right. The Sustainable Development Goals could not have come into effect in January 2012, because in January 2012 they did not exist: the conference that started the process of drafting them had not yet met, and it would meet that June. The goals were adopted on 25 September 2015 and came into effect on 1 January 2016, running to 2030. The month in the statement is the true part — the 2030 Agenda did begin on the first of a January — which is what makes the sentence read plausibly to a candidate who has stored 'January' without its year. Anyone choosing this option is also declaring statements (b) and (c) false, and both are uncontroversially true, so the option asks a candidate to be wrong three times over.

Concept: The Sustainable Development Goals are the seventeen goals and 169 targets of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all United Nations member states on 25 September 2015 in the resolution 'Transforming our world', in force from 1 January 2016 and due in 2030. They are also called the Global Goals. Their line of descent is worth holding as a sequence of conferences rather than as a list of dates. The 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment put the environment on the international agenda; the Brundtland Commission's report 'Our Common Future' in 1987 supplied the working definition of sustainable development as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs; the 1992 Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro produced Agenda 21 and the two great environmental conventions; the Millennium Summit of 2000 produced the eight Millennium Development Goals for 2015; the World Summit on Sustainable Development at Johannesburg in 2002 reviewed them; and the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development at Rio de Janeiro in June 2012, Rio+20, agreed 'The Future We Want' and set an Open Working Group to draft goals to follow the MDGs. The SDGs differ from the MDGs in three ways that examiners like: they are universal rather than aimed at developing countries, they are far broader, and they are politically rather than legally binding, with each country reporting on its own progress. In India, NITI Aayog is the nodal institution and publishes the SDG India Index, first released in 2018.

State PCS 2021 Q42 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2021 Q42 — Economy PYQ with Answer