COMUNICACIÓN

Young European and Ibero-American experts meet in Guadeloupe to explore the challenges of the Sustainable Development Objectives

The director of the European and Ibero-American Academy Foundation of Yuste, Juan Carlos Moreno, has inaugurated the course ‘Perspectives and challenges of Agenda 2030: equality, sustainable communities and solid institutions for development, peace and the achievement of the ODS’, at the Cultural and Congress Centre of Guadeloupe, within the Yuste Campus programme.

The course, in which young people and European and Ibero-American experts take part in order to deepen the challenges of the Sustainable Development Objectives (ODS), will be held over three days and is directed by the lecturer of the Autonomous University of Madrid, Manuela Mesa and the lecturer of the University of Extremadura, Juan Manuel Rodríguez Barrigón.

“The 17 Sustainable Development Goals have a common aspiration that is set out in the Preamble of Agenda 2030: to transform our world. It’s a long road in which this course should be a much-needed boost to our commitment to achieving the ODS,” said Juan Carlos Moreno at the opening of the course.

To achieve the ODS requires joint and coordinated action between administrations and citizens, “public administrations must take the necessary political measures to eradicate so many evils, but awareness and education to solve them is definitely everyone’s job,” said the director.

In this sense, he explained that the administrations must equip themselves with an organization that allows the ODS to be a transversal task in all public organisms, and he pointed out that at the same time, a coordination between the most representative organizations of the civil society is necessary so that “they do not waste all their efforts in uncoordinated actions”.

The co-director of the course, Manuela Mesa Peinado, explained that the course will focus on the reduction of inequalities from an economic and gender point of view, as well as on the next challenges of the Agenda.

On the other hand, the director general of the High Commissioner for Agenda 2030 of the Spanish Government, Federico Buyolo García, pointed out that the Agenda is “a plan of action and transformation in which it is important to take into account how we are going to work to create a new social model”.

According to Buyolo, it is necessary that the globalization that has taken place in the world also takes place among citizens, through dialogue and alliances since, in his opinion, “there are local problems that require global solutions, and global problems that need local solutions”. Finally, he urged citizens and administrations to implement Agenda 2030 because “we have the knowledge, the commitment and the will that allows there to be a global citizenship and an individual doing”.

For the academic from Yuste and president of the Foundation for a Culture of Peace, Federico Mayor Zaragoza, “the only thing that can make it possible for all the citizens of the world to demand that our governments put the ODS into practice and that we ourselves get involved in their implementation is, precisely, to think about future generations”. In his opinion, for the first time in history, we are facing irreversible phenomena, “and only with the execution of the ODS will we be able to stop them”.

Mayor Zaragoza recalled the quote from Albert Camus that he read when he was 16 years old: “I despise them, because since they could do so much, they dared to do so little”, a phrase that, in their opinion, translates into “today we have the efforts and knowledge to put the ODS into practice, and if we don’t do it, we bear an enormous responsibility for history because we forget about future generations”.