The Sustainable Development Goals at this point are almost eight years old and, as we know, eight years is a long time for something as volatile and sensitive as sustainability and sustainable development. The technology that we use every day changes every day then, shouldn’t the guidelines and the goals that are to make proper checks on it also be evolved at least at the same pace? 

Research by the University of Leeds found that 63 of the 169 SDGs targets were likely to affect the forest cover. 

”A Systematic Study of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Interactions” ,says that none of the goals in SDGs has a clear definition and that there are trade-offs necessary between goals to implement the goals since the domain of each goal is not mutually exclusive. I strongly agree with this and believe that no goal can be perfectly achieved because it comes at the cost of another. Continuation of all these goals will thus lead to a lock-in situation where no goal can be achieved instead of fewer but fewer and more  focused goals. To be the Jack of all trades but, master of none is not something to be proud of. 

The goals put forward by the United Nations seem realistic only in an ideal and utopian world. The first goal of Sustainable Development Goals is “Zero Hunger”. Hunger is not something that can only be solved by feeding people daily because, at the end of the day, it is a temporary solution. If a country needs to implement the policy of “Zero Hunger”, then it should also start investing huge amounts of money and time to build infrastructure to implement and execute long-term measures like having proper long-term agriculture facilities at places where they lack and this is an uphill battle at places where the conditions for agriculture are not suitable and sustainable that no country can even imagine how much to allot for just this goal. Combining this with the other sixteen goals, the country’s resources will have a huge drain. A more realistic set of goals grounded on a realistic basis would have been a better priority than an unrealistic set of goals imagined in a utopian world.

In conclusion, in my personal opinion, the current set of Sustainable development goals adopted by the UN in 2015 is not sustainable enough. A set of Sustainable goals that are less idealistic and  in numbers but address the most urgent and specific needs of the world is more important than having a host of goals that fail to address all the problems as a whole due to highly overlapping domains. Sustainable Development Goals are the need of the current time but, having a half-baked idea is no better than having no idea at all in the first place.