Tracking the Interlinkages across SDGs: The Case of Hill Centered Education Network in Bogota, Colombia

Valeria Andreoni,Valeria Ruiz Vargas

doi:10.3390/su12197924

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to use the successful example of the Hill Centered Education Network in Bogota, Colombia, to discuss the role that education and bottom-up initiatives can have in the integrated implementation of the 2030 Agenda. Founded in 2015 by a team of three organisations, the Bogota Hill Network includes today more than 100 schools, 21 non-governmental organisations and three governmental agencies. Oriented to promote ecological conservation through education, the network uses the natural ecosystems of the city as a learning environment where collaborative projects are created and implemented. By involving a large number of pupils with different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds, the initiative has been able to promote equality and inclusion while developing environmental stewardship of students and communities. The achievements of the projects, together with the main opportunities and challenges, are used in this paper to map the interlinkages across targets and goals and to discuss the role of education in the development of integrated partnerships across a wide range of sustainability dimensions. From a policy perspective, the discussion of the bottom-up initiatives and the identification of successful examples can support the design of policies and the replication of sustainability initiatives.

Highlights

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted by the global community in September 2015, set an ambitious range of targets aiming to reach an integrated balance among socio-economic and environmental objectives [1]
Unlike the previous Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the 2030 Agenda emphasizes the role of coordinated actions and aims to capture the interlinkages and dependencies existing between targets and goals [2]
The interlinkages analysis and visualization tool, developed by the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) [9] and the analytical frameworks proposed by European Commission [10] and International Council for Science [11] are just some examples of the multidimensional efforts devoted to promote a better understanding of the spill over effects

Summary

Introduction

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted by the global community in September 2015, set an ambitious range of targets aiming to reach an integrated balance among socio-economic and environmental objectives [1]. The possibility to design policies able to address more than one target at the same time is an opportunity for cost reduction and efficiency, as highlighted by United Nations [5,6]. Within this context, a system thinking approach, devoted to combine multifaced knowledge perspectives in the analysis of the sustainability interactions, has been largely used as theoretical and operational structure [7,8]. The development of case studies, devoted to account for context-based circumstances, have been advocated as a fundamental factor complementing the modelling approaches reported above [21]

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Discussion

Conclusion