Bridging the Last Mile in Sustainability
Sustainable Development Goals
The UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Last Mile
The 17 Sustainable Development Goals
(SDGs), adopted by the UN Summit on Sustainable Development in 2015, became part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in January 2016. These 17 goals represent the aspirations of humanity, and include a 15-year global strategy for implementation and assessment. The goals are central to expanding human prosperity and achieving the potential of humanity in the 21st century.
The Last Mile, in international development terms, represents the final and most difficult barrier to expanding human prosperity: reaching isolated and poor communities. These communities are often rural, with no paved roads, limited communications, and sparse infrastructure. They can also be urban, with social, cultural and economic barriers as difficult to cross as a mile of muddy road. Three quarters of our impoverished brothers and sisters live in rural areas where inadequate access to education, healthcare, clean water, sanitation, and food are daily challenges.
The 17th Goal – Creating and Managing Public and Private Partnerships
The 17th Goal of the SDGs
is to expand global partnerships for sustainable development. Successfully building a bridge across the Last Mile depends on public-private partnerships that coordinate and leverage actions from governments, the private sector and civil society. We formed G17 Solutions to bring design solutions to these partnerships. The 17th Goal acknowledges the need for shared principles, values, vision, and goals across global, regional, national and local levels to achieve the 16 sustainability goals. The mission of G17 Solutions is to use technology and design to harness the power of private sector activities, especially markets, with public-good programs to create shared frameworks and collective action across multiple goals within a community.
The G17 Solutions Team
The leadership team at G17 engages a global network of interdisciplinary talent to address complex challenges. We engage the technical and heuristic insights of economists, social/political scientists, ecologists, supply chain managers, philosophers, engineers, architects, planners, and historians to insure contextual awareness and effectiveness for each project.
Scope of Services
G17 was formed in 2018 to provide a portfolio of services to achieve the 17th goal of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). G17 brings meta-disciplinary design to complex, multi-metric challenges in sustainability. The scope of services provided by G17 Team Leaders include sustainable design, assessment, and management of complex systems to enhance prosperity.
Design
- Ecosystem design for water treatment
- Aquatic ecosystem design for aquaculture production efficiency & yield
- Ecosystem design for ecosystem services
- Restoration/preservation of critical ecosystem habitat
- Urban hydrology design for low impact development
- Housing design for aging populations
- Resilient neighborhood design for cultural and social engagement
- Resilient agriculture and food system design to reduce food insecurity and improve health
- Solving the City- creating integrated design for human interface with the built city
Assessment
- Life Cycle Assessment (ISO 14040 and 14044 compliant) to reduce risk and impacts from production processes
- Indicator and metric development for continuous improvement (ANSI S628 compliant)
- Developing clear metrics for system performance
- Assessment and reporting of system performance
- Analysis of industry and community system efficiency and potential for improvement
Management
- Setting goals for sustainable and resilient production
- Defining goals across complex platforms (Aspirational, Strategic, Operational, and Tactical)
- Creating clear messaging within agencies, organizations, and enterprises on goals and strategies for sustainability
- Finding common ground - Stakeholder engagement to develop common understanding and vision for approaching complex, long-term problems
- Risk assessment and operational strategy development
© G17 Solutions
