The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015, provides a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future. At its heart are the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which are an urgent call for action by all countries – developed and developing – in a global partnership. They recognise that ending poverty and other deprivations must go hand-in-hand with strategies that improve health and education, reduce inequality, and spur economic growth – all while tackling climate change and working to preserve our oceans and forests.
The 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, and the 17 SDGs that underpin it, recognise that the natural world and its life-giving services must be urgently protected if we are to fulfil the needs of nine billion people by 2050. The SDGs are premised on the notion that we cannot solve problems in isolation. For example, producing more food for the growing human population (SDG2) will require freshwater supplies for adequate irrigation (SDG6). The availability of freshwater depends on healthy ecosystems (SDGs 14 and 15), which are increasingly impacted by climate change (SDG13). Protecting these ecosystems requires strong institutions, governance and cooperation from the local to the international level (SDGs16 and 17).
IUCN has engaged actively in the negotiations since the Rio+20 Conference to ensure that the 2030 Agenda promotes sustainable development in all its dimensions: a true integration of the environmental, social and economic aspects. Click here to find out more about IUCN and the SDGs.
The IUCN Green List Standard is a good example of such an integrated approach, bringing together environmental, social and economic aspects of protected and conserved areas to advance their sustainable development now and in the future.
This dashboard below shows how the Green List Standard relates to the SDGs through its  components, criteria and indicators.. You can find out which exactly, by reading our standard. The IUCN Green List Standard allows protected and conserved areas to demonstrate their contribution to all of the SDGs.
