Discover 14 opportunities in sustainability

Four years ago, the world adopted an ambitious set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) designed ‘to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity by 2030’. Despite rising life expectancy and the eradication of many endemic diseases, more than 400 million people in the member states of the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB) still live in absolute poverty, subsisting on less than US$1.90 per day. It is, perhaps, these countries that face the greatest challenges in fulfilling the SDGs. Traditional methods of development finance have struggled to alleviate the extreme poverty in some regions of the world, leaving the poorest populations without the basic building blocks needed to lead healthy lives and build dignified livelihoods. Many remain deprived of primary healthcare, protection against infectious diseases, a sufficient and nutritious food supply, potable water, clean power, and sanitation.

Although recently popularised in America, the Green New Deal (GND) was actually born during the early days of the 2007/8 financial crisis, in a small flat in London. The owner of the flat was analyst and foreseer of the crisis, Ann Pettifor; the occasion was a get-together of environmentalists and economists who had convened to draft a plan they hoped would both ‘transform the economy and protect the ecosystem’. Unfortunately for the London attendees, the prevailing political currents post crash proved especially hostile toward their idea, and prioritised, instead, principles of fiscal discipline and austerity, while largely sidelining issues of climate. And as long as such consensus reigned, the nascent GND was forced to lie dormant, far from political discourse.