What are the Global Goals?

This past September, 193 governments agreed upon the Sustainable Development Goals, an ambitious agenda also known as the Global Goals. The Global Goals are essentially a 17-point plan to end poverty, combat climate change and fight injustice and inequality. These goals replace and build upon the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which were agreed upon in 2001 and expired at the end of the 2015.

The Global Goals constitute the next 15-year framework that will guide country plans, priorities and investments to reduce poverty and promote development. They will influence the definition of development, how it is funded and how it is measured.

With so many big, bold, aspirational goals, you may wonder: where do we start in actually carrying out this work? The good news is we already have. With your support, LWR is already taking on the work in many of the Global Goals.

In this blog series, we have explored a few of the Global Goals you are directly supporting through LWR. And we will finish with Goal #13.

Climate Action

Goal #13: Climate Action aims to urge us to take action to combat climate and its impacts. This goal sets the priority of strengthening the resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards and natural disasters in all countries and improving education, awareness-raising and human and institutional capacity on climate change mitigation, adaptation, impact reduction and early warning.

For this climate change goal, we see the complementary and interlocking way the SDGs coincide with the goal of ending hunger (#2) in a way that highlights the clarity of LWR’s focus on resilience, adaptation and the importance of local planning to meet the challenge. In our work, we seek to foster community mitigation of and adaptation to changing climates to secure livelihoods and landscapes as a means to improve the lives of rural communities experiencing poverty in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. LWR believes that helping communities be better prepared for natural disasters, as well as embrace innovative climate smart agriculture practices, are key elements in building resilient communities and strong local economies. We take a “systems approach” to engage a range of stakeholders in program design and implementation, and strengthen civil society so that local organizations are prepared for and able to respond to the effects of climate change.

LWR employs four core and emerging program approaches in its climate work, to design and implement integrated programs that help rural communities respond within their local context. Through climate smart agriculture, community-based disaster risk management, renewable energy and reforestation work, we aim to help communities become resilient in adaptive in the facing of changing weather patterns.

Let’s take a look at how LWR is already doing the work of climate adaptation.

How Your Support Helps

In the past year alone, your gifts have supported 28 LWR climate change projects, including 10 in Africa, 9 in the Asia and the Middle East, and 10 in Latin America. The projects help farmers and their communities build capacity to adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change.

For more on this article visit LWR.org