Sustainability, from everyone to everyone

The concept of sustainability is used and abused. You resort to debt, employment, the SNS or Social Security.

Those who are not in favor of sustainability should raise their hands, even if it means privatization of public services, for some, or public provision and progressive taxes, for others. It is a noun that is confused with an adjective, it qualifies more than it defines. It avoids divergence, the discussion that allows democratic choices.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are the privileged way of bringing sustainability, in its different dimensions (environmental, social and economic), to the concrete, substantive, unavoidable discussion of survival and development, involving everyone ( people, companies and institutions that represent them). In recent weeks, it is this discussion that has been present in the preparation of the National Voluntary Report on compliance with the SDGs in public assemblies held in different regions of the country.

In Guimarães, the progress made in SDG (9) “Industry, innovation and infrastructure” was discussed. The commitment to the circular economy of the industry in the North of Portugal with a strong export orientation was evident, a consolidated agenda of CCDR-Norte, which has its main source of funding in the Northern Regional Program (North 2030). To these regional advances must be added those that are also registered in the SDG (4) “Quality and inclusive education” or in the SDG (7) “Renewable energies”, namely with regard to the improvement of educational success, the reduction of school dropouts , attending higher education or increasing energy production from renewable sources (50% of the total produced in this NUTS II region).

The pursuit of the SDGs constitutes an agenda for the integration of disciplines and actors (integration was a recurrent expression in these assemblies). Integration presupposes space, as it is from well-defined territories of the physical (not virtual) world that the action of companies, municipalities, higher education institutions or research and development units is articulated. But, in this case, the whole is not the sum of the parts, demanding the definition of scales, of each and every one, from the global to the local, passing through the one where the synthesis of the action in these two extremes is best carried out: the regional scale. Without people’s quality of life, the health of the planet cannot be preserved, that is, no one is exempt from contributing to the construction of our common destiny.

*President of CCDR-N