Globalby Karen Brown, Ph.D.
The well-known adage to “think globally, act locally” asks us to understand the connections between our own communities and the bigger, global picture. At the University of Minnesota, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) offer one way to illuminate the global-local relationship.
Three hallmarks of the SDGs make them an especially useful tool for fostering research, education, and partnerships at the University of Minnesota. First, the SDGs are holistic and integrative—that is, the framework calls for attention to trade-offs and synergies among the goals. For example, will the use of certain approaches to increasing food production (SDG 2 Zero Hunger) affect efforts to meet Climate Action targets (SDG 13)? Second, this framework emphasizes action toward the goals, and thereby focuses our attention on the impact of our activities. Finally, unlike previous international frameworks, the SDGs call for truly global action. Achieving the ambitious goals requires all countries and communities to participate.
The University established the SDG Initiative in 2019 to address the issues identified by the SDGs—not only in research and education, but also in our institutional operations. We have mapped UMN courses and research to the SDGs, enabling students and others to find opportunities for engagement on the issues that matter to them. The Initiative has also given SDG research grants to faculty, staff, and students to foster exploration and analysis in areas including sustainable food systems, gender-based violence in refugee camps, rural wastewater management, and equitable urban greenspace access.
The University’s most recent institutional strategic plan, MPact 2025, expresses an institutional commitment through a number of measures related to sustainability, including improving our performance vis-a-vis the SDGs as measured by our assessment in the Times Higher Education Impact Rankings. The Impact Rankings are a relatively new ranking system that explicitly evaluates how higher education institutions are doing—as place-based institutions, as research producers, and educators and partners—in addressing the urgent issues raised by the SDGs. The process of collecting and analyzing data for the Impact Rankings enables us to see how we are doing in several key areas, and how we might strive to do better.
A partnership with ESRI, the Kellogg Foundation, and the Public Foundation to develop an SDG data platform will enable universities and their sub-national regions to contribute to the goals of the SDG Data Alliance by measuring, tracking, and promoting local efforts. Collecting and analyzing this data can help to integrate and connect often isolated local efforts toward national and international change. The SDG Initiative and UMN play an important role in fostering local implementation of the SDGs.
While the transformative power of the SDGs ultimately lie in how they impact ordinary people within local communities around the world, the SDG framework represents a significant global issue for college students to understand as future leaders in this critical area. The University’s commitment to this agenda provides a strong foundation for sustainability education, research, and partnerships.
Karen Brown is co-lead of the UMN Sustainable Development Goals Initiative and Director of the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change