Friday 15 December 2017

Technology Travelators for Sustainable Development Goals




Technology Travelators for Sustainable Development Goals

Sustainable Development (SD) will perhaps qualify as the most ‘Malleable’ word in English lexicon. Since the publication of 'Our common future' in 1984, SD continues to occupy a non-negotiable position in almost all global programmes. It is perceived as the metaphorical blind men describing an elephant. Over the past 3 decades; the theme kept metamorphosing over Johannesburg, Kyoto and Millennium Assessment to reach the present, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Despite increasing awareness of consequences of our consumption pattern, we remain opulent and continue to slide down to increasingly more unsustainable realm. Our present understanding teaches that the breaks to stop the slide lie in our attitude and behaviour.

However, it is interesting to observe that as we slide down, we seem to get more 'interconnected'. Whilst it is yet to be ascertained if there is any relation in our interconnectedness and sustainability, it provides an unexplored lever to augur ourselves towards a sustainable trajectory. [http://envinfoiiitmk.blogspot.in/2017/07/from-intelligence-quotient-iq-to.html]. Willfully or otherwise, we are getting increasingly entangled in the network. They have grown to proportions big enough to influence individual human behaviour.

With the emergence of disruptive technologies and expansion in our ability to reveal hidden patterns from data-mazes are transforming the way we address challenges. However, advocacy of latent transformative potential of these technologies are mostly speculative. But for few illustrative case studies, there hardly exists any operational program(s) that leverage these technologies for the benefit of the masses and the goodness of nature. Neither are there any studies that dwell upon the prospects of frontier technologies to help us achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). 

Carefully prioritized, frontier technologies can act as travelators that help us close the SDG gaps, safely.

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