The Global Goals, tell everyone!

Goal 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions) is the most important Global Goal to me. The arms trade, war and its after-effects are major causes of much of the world's problems. Without war, we would have more stable societies and families. Without war, we would have less poverty and hunger. Without war, we would have better sanitation and infrastructure so that economies could flourish. Without war, we would have more money to invest in education and health care. Without war, countries could co-operate to make the world kinder, fairer and more sustainable.

When I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease, last year, medical professionals seemed happy enough to give me strong, expensive, drugs to prevent the symptoms and other drugs to ease the side effects the first drugs gave me. To me, this didn't seem right so I put more effort into looking after myself. Educating myself to be more aware of what my body and mind needs means that I don't need to take the medicines. I've found the triggers to my illness and I'm managing them using a better diet, meditation and relaxation techniques that cost me, and the government, next to nothing.

Partly because I think it's both generally overlooked and impossible to get decent results without continental or even global coordination. Oceanic health and fishery stocks are interconnected with everything else and I don't think it's reasonable for any country to temporarily or permanently absolve itself of responsibility in the interests of, say, retaining GDP over an arbitrary baseline.

Sadly we're not doing very well! :-(

I'm particularly motivated by the hunger goal because of my involvement with Valid Nutrition (VN), an Irish Charity (of which I'm a founding member). VN is led by my friend Dr. Steve Collins who has been the central figure behind the development and expansion of CMAM (Community-based Management of Acute Malnutrition) and is working to address the problem of chronic malnutrition too: over one-third of all children in developing countries globally experience chronic malnutrition – often referred to as “hidden hunger”. Aside from the inherent suffering, the devastating longer-term consequences (both developmentally for the child and ultimately for their country) are often not understood.

Since the goals were announced, I must have changed my mind several times about which one is the most important to me. You can’t end poverty unless you also tackle climate change and good health is not possible without clean water and sanitation. In the end, I feel quality education is the foundation of everything. Education supports a person to be independent and stand up against inequality. It's a well-used saying but I do believe “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish (responsibly) and you feed him for a lifetime.”

Ultimately these 17 Global Goals are a blueprint for the World we want to live in and hopefully by the year 2030 it will be a reality.  

The new Global Goals replace the Millennium Development Goals which between 1990 - 2015 helped lift more than 1 billion people out of extreme poverty. If you want to remind yourself of these goals, here's some work we did for One.