Exploring the challenges and opportunities of the United Nations sustainable development goals: a dialogue between a climate scientist and management scholars

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/CG-01-2018-0028
• Pages: 552-564
• Published date: 13 March 2019
• Date: 13 March 2019
• Author: Umesh Mukhi,Camilla Quental
• Subject Matter: Corporate governance,Strategy

Viewpoint

Exploring the challenges and opportunities

of the United Nations sustainable

development goals: a dialogue between a

climate scientist and management scholars

Umesh Mukhi and Camilla Quental

1. Introduction

In mid-November 2017, while we were in Brussels preparing the presentation of our

research paper at the ABIS Annual Colloquium, an important article which appeared in Le

Monde caught our attention: “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice”. By

reading the article further, we could realize that 25 years before, more than 1,700

independent scientists, including the majority of living Nobel laureates in the sciences, had

already showed that humans were on a collision course with the natural world. They called

on humankind to curtail environmental destruction and expressed concern about current,

impending or potential damage on planet Earth involving ozone depletion, freshwater

availability, marine life depletion, ocean dead zones, forest loss, biodiversity destruction,

climate change and continued human populationgrowth.

In the “Second Notice” in November 2017, with more than 15,000 signatories from all ends

of the Earth, we could read that by failing to adequately limit population growth, reassess

the role of an economy rooted in growth, reduce greenhouse gases, incentivize renewable

energy, protect habitat, restore ecosystems, curb pollution, halt defaunation and constrain

invasive alien species, humanity is not taking the urgent steps needed to safeguard our

imperiled biosphere. Examples of positive change in the past 25 years were given, such as

the rapid global decline in ozone-depletingsubstances; advancements in reducing extreme

poverty and hunger (www.worldbank.org); the rapid decline in fertility rates in many regions

attributable to investments in girls’ and women’s education (www.un.org/esa/population);

the promising decline in the rate of deforestation in some regions; and the rapid growth in

the renewable energy sector. However, the advancement of urgently needed changes in

environmental policy, humanbehavior and global inequities is still far from sufficient(https://

academic.oup.com/bioscience).

This episode made us reflect even further on the gap between what science produces to

inform humanity and policy making. There is a clear separation between these realms.

Indeed, science is advancingmuch more rapidly than policies can incorporate the scientific

results into sustainability policies. Indeed, scientists are warning humanityabout the risks of

continuing acting the way we do and showing solutions. Nevertheless, the positive actions

take 5, 10 and 15 years to occur given the slow pace of policy making. This is one of the

most important and powerful assessments made by our interviewee professor and climate

scientist Dr Carlos Nobre, who is one of the signatories of the “Warning to Humanity”. He

Umesh Mukhi is based at

Fundac¸a

˜o Getulio Vargas’s

Sao Paulo School of

Business Administration

(FGV EAESP), Sao Paulo,

Brazil. Camilla Quental is

based at Audencia

Business School, Nantes,

France.

Received 14 January 2018

Revised 28 September 2018

9 November 2018

Accepted 17 December 2018

PAGE 552 jCORPORATE GOVERNANCE jVOL. 19 NO. 3 2019, pp. 552-564, ©EmeraldPublishing Limited, ISSN 1472-0701 DOI 10.1108/CG-01-2018-0028