Sustainable development a must if Earth to remain inhabitable: UN Assembly chief

The new president of the United Nations' (UN) General Assembly promoting the world organization's new 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) warned Monday that if mankind fails to achieve sustainability, the Earth will no longer be inhabitable.

Mogens Lykketoft, former speaker of the Danish parliament, held his first formal meeting with reporters at the UN Headquarters in New York since taking over the gavel of the 70th session of the UN General Assembly on Sept. 15.

"The SDGs are not only specific goals for the next 15 years," he said, referring to the 17-point SDG program which replaced the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) program to expire this year and will be formally adopted at the SDG summit beginning Friday.

The new program serves up "a very new philosophy asking for a different course from the one we have taken in economic and social development for the last 15 or last 70 years, the necessity of integrating," Lykketoft said.

"If you see what came out of the MDGs, it was about poor people in poor countries," he said. "We reached the main goal of cutting by half the number of extremely poor people in the world and that was good."

"But what we realized for the SDGs is that we cannot eradicate poverty by going along exactly the same road in the next 15 years," Lykketoft said, adding that there is an interdependency between factors such as poverty eradication, environmental catastrophes and climate change.

"Because if we don't act on environmental catastrophes and climate change, we will see conflicts and costs and uncontrolled migration develop into a size where there are no resources for development and no possibility left for sustainability on the planet," the president said.

"That's the revolutionary conclusion of the SDGs," he said. Lykketoft also stressed the importance of the fight against inequalities, both within nations and between nations.

Asked whether he expected any opposition to the implementation of the SDGs which have already been approved but not formally adopted, the president said, "There will always be opposition from vested interests of different kinds against any change in the distribution of income and welfare."

"The whole process of the SDGs shows us that there is an increasing understanding -- for instance, in the global business community -- that in order to have a sustainable, stable, social and environmental framework to work and earn money in, you have to comply with the goals of the SDGs."

To that end, he said, there are three pillars to fulfill the financial needs of the SDGs. The first pillar requires that rich countries meet their obligations on ODA (Official Development Assistance) at 0.7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).

While the president admitted there was a long way to go to achieve this, he said that "most of what should be done should be financed from other sources because we are talking about trillions of dollars necessary to invest in sustainability."

The second pillar is "much stronger international cooperation and national institution building in taxation," Lykketoft said. "That would be much more important for many developing countries than traditional ODA if we support each other in reaching that goal."

The third pillar, he said, is that "the lion's share of all this will have to come from private sources investing in their own interest in sustainable development" while the role of governments "is to create a framework ... that makes it obvious that green investment is the best investment."

As for the current tidal wave of refugees and migrants in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, the president anticipated it will be on his agenda for the General Assembly.

He said the migrant crises stem from "millions of people in very, very catastrophic conditions," adding that the crises have to be addressed immediately.

"This is not only about refugees from wars and persecution," Lykketoft said, "this is also a migration out of poverty and how we can regulate that."

"All these will be much more on the agenda of the United Nations than they have ever been before because the problems that we are facing are bigger than ever before," he said. Endi