Now that two major global conferences, the G20 and COP30, have just concluded, we must explain and critique a recurring theme in both events: Sustainable Development.
At the 2025 G20 Summit in Johannesburg, global leaders articulated a renewed vision for sustainable development amid increasing climate and economic pressures, emphasising equity, resilience, and finance as key pillars of progress.
The G20’s Johannesburg Declaration, adopted on November 23 despite geopolitical tensions, including a US boycott, committed to building a more inclusive, resilient, and sustainable global economy.”
Complementing this, COP30’s Belém Political Package, finalised on November 22 after extended negotiations, advanced adaptation by calling for triple adaptation finance by 2035 to protect vulnerable communities, while launching the Tropical Forest Forever Facility to safeguard biodiversity-dependent livelihoods and pledging increased support for clean energy transitions that prioritise workers and indigenous rights.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres praised these progressions, noting that COP30 has delivered progress in integrating climate action into sustainable development.
What is sustainable development?
It constitutes socio-economic progress that demands acute attention to the environment and climate change. According to the United Nations, sustainable development is global progress “that seeks to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” It encompasses a broad range of activities and principles to promote the long-term health and stability of the environment, society, and economy.
Sustainability initiatives include effective resource management, climate change adaptation and mitigation. The ambition is that economic and social progress should not come at the expense of the environment or future generations. Effective management of natural resources, including water, land, and energy, is essential for sustainable development.
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Developing strategies to mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change is increasingly seen as a critical aspect of development. There are four key aspects or types of sustainability: Environmental Sustainability, Social Sustainability, Economic Sustainability, and Governance Sustainability.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are 17 linked objectives adopted in 2015 to tackle the world’s most urgent issues by 2030. These targets include ending poverty and hunger, ensuring healthy lives and well-being, providing affordable, quality education, achieving gender equality, securing clean water and sanitation, delivering affordable and reliable energy, and fostering sustainable economic growth.
Each goal is supported by specific targets and indicators, offering a measurable framework for progress. The SDGs are universal, applicable to all countries regardless of income level, emphasise the interconnected nature of global challenges, and therefore require comprehensive solutions.
Related to the SDG framework is the concept of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG). This pertains to the three key factors used to assess the sustainability and influence of an investment in a company or enterprise.
These criteria help investors and stakeholders evaluate the potential long-term performance and ethical impact of their investments. ESG investing, also known as sustainable or socially responsible investing (SRI), involves selecting investments based on ESG criteria.
Investors utilise ESG ratings and reports to assess the sustainability and ethical impact of their investment decisions, aiming to endorse companies that reflect their values and contribute positively to society and the environment.
ESG criteria have emerged as a vital and strategic framework for evaluating organisations’ sustainability and ethical impact, shaping how businesses operate in a rapidly changing world. By integrating ESG into core operations, businesses can drive positive change while securing their long-term viability in a rapidly evolving global landscape.
The link between the SDGs and ESG principles lies in their shared vision of fostering a more sustainable, equitable, and resilient world.
Both frameworks guide efforts to address global challenges, emphasising the interconnectedness of economic growth, social well-being, and environmental stewardship. While the SDGs are a global agenda set by the United Nations to address 17 specific goals by 2030, ESG is a corporate framework that evaluates an organisation’s practices and impact across environmental, social, and governance dimensions. Together, they create a synergistic pathway for sustainable development.
The environmental aspect of ESG aligns directly with the SDGs focused on climate action, clean energy, and life on land and water.
Companies adopting ESG principles often reduce carbon emissions, manage resources efficiently, and protect biodiversity — actions that contribute to achieving these goals. For instance, transitioning to renewable energy supports the SDGs’ climate and energy targets while enhancing a company’s ESG performance.
The social dimension of ESG aligns with the SDGs, which address poverty, education, gender equality, and decent work. ESG principles encourage businesses to prioritise equitable labour practices, workplace diversity, and community engagement.
Organisations that promote employee well-being, ensure safe working conditions, and invest in local communities directly contribute to these SDGs while building trust and loyalty among stakeholders.
The governance pillar intersects with SDGs related to peace, justice, and strong institutions. ESG emphasises transparency, accountability, and ethical decision-making in corporate governance.
Clearly, the SDG agenda and ESG criteria are vital global tools for advancing sustainable development. However, there can be no victory unless the liberal interpretation of this global aspiration is challenged. Sustainable development cannot be regarded as an end in itself.
It cannot merely be a polished slogan on banners while the underlying machinery of injustice, poverty, and inequality continues to operate. Sustainable development must be viewed as a means for radical, irreversible socio-economic transformation that redefines the lives of the marginalised and excluded.
Its only effective and sound measure of success is whether it enhances the quality of life for every individual, particularly those born into cycles of deprivation and exploitation that wealthier nations tend to overlook. Anything less is not sustainable development. It is superficial greenwashing that leaves the architecture of inequality untouched — sustainable underdevelopment.
Meaningful, sustainable development must achieve inclusive economic growth and shared prosperity on an unprecedented scale. It must generate decent jobs, establish schools and clinics, provide nutritious food, and guarantee that the next generation inherits opportunities rather than debt and drought. Merely making growth greener is insufficient. Growth itself must be redistributed so that its benefits reach the smallholder farmer in Ethiopia, the slum dweller in Mumbai, and the indigenous community in the Amazon.
Without intentional redistribution, the entire effort risks devolving into an elite pact that defends privilege under the guise of planetary responsibility.
A starving peasant cannot be expected to prioritise a green agenda, and a father who carries firewood for miles so his children can cook one meal a day will not applaud the early retirement of a distant coal plant.
A girl who studies by candlelight because the grid never reached her valley cannot reasonably be asked to condemn the fossil fuels that might one day bring her electric light, a refrigerator for vaccines, or a pump to irrigate her family’s crops. For billions of people, energy poverty is not a footnote; it is the central fact of existence. Therefore, ending energy poverty must be the unequivocal global priority.
The just energy transition itself must be firmly anchored in the needs of the poor. It must be paced, financed, and shaped by their urgent need for energy, work, health, and dignity. Only a transition that puts the last first can hope to endure.
Efforts must address energy poverty
Across Africa, energy poverty remains a daily, grinding reality for 600 million people — more than 43 percent of the continent’s 1.4 billion inhabitants — who live beyond the reach of any electric grid. They cook over wood or charcoal, under clouds of choking smoke, and send their children to study by the dim flicker of kerosene lamps.
At the same time, extreme income poverty grips roughly 500 million Africans, or 36 percent of the continent’s population, forcing them to survive on less than US$1,90 a day in a world that grows richer and more electrified around them.
These two deprivations are not separate afflictions; they feed into each other in a vicious cycle that traps families, villages, and entire nations in stagnation. Sustainable development that deserves the name cannot treat these twin crises (general poverty and energy poverty) as afterthoughts or unfortunate side effects to be managed while the world races toward net-zero.
It must place the simultaneous eradication of energy poverty and extreme poverty at the very centre of its agenda, globally and specifically in Africa.
Only by bringing reliable, affordable power to clinics, schools, farms, and small enterprises, and by ensuring that the benefits of growth reach the poorest households first, can the continent break free from the interlocking chains that have held it back for generations.
Anything less is not sustainable, and it is certainly not development. Promises of sustainability should be measured against the stark realities of empty stomachs and homes without access to electricity.
Hence, eight SDGs rise above the rest as non-negotiable foundations: ending poverty in all its forms, banishing hunger from the earth, securing health and well-being for everyone, delivering affordable and quality education, guaranteeing clean water and dignified sanitation, providing affordable and reliable energy to every household, creating decent work and genuine economic growth that reaches the margins, and taking the bold climate action that protects the poorest from a crisis they did not create.
These eight are not abstract aspirations; they are the intertwined roots from which any honest vision of sustainable development must grow.
The commitments to deliver sustainable development from the 2025 G20 Johannesburg Summit and COP30 in Belém will ultimately fail to bring about socio-economic transformation because a narrow liberal interpretation of sustainable development underpins and informs the declarations.
More importantly, they are non-binding and lack enforceable mechanisms. Furthermore, they are devoid of financial commitments beyond vague billions to trillions rhetoric and the political will to challenge entrenched fossil fuel dependencies or geopolitical fractures that perpetuate the very global inequalities, widespread poverty, and energy poverty these forums must address.
This makes the ambitious statements mere self-serving echoes of unfulfilled promises. What’s worse, these multilateral institutions do not even acknowledge or discuss the issue of reparations for slavery, colonialism, neo-colonialism and climate damage.
Sustainable development must deliver socio-economic transformation — a fundamental and structural reshaping of society’s economic and social systems so that wealth, power, opportunity, and human dignity are redistributed from the few to the many, breaking centuries-old cycles of poverty, exclusion, and dehumanisation while prioritising the well-being of ordinary people — especially the poorest and historically exploited — at the centre of progress.
All climate change policies and interventions must first tackle extreme poverty. The global inequality crisis must take precedence over the climate change crisis. This is an adapted excerpt from the book Deploying Artificial Intelligence to Achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals: Enablers, Drivers and Strategic Framework.
Prof Mutambara is the director and full professor of the Institute for the Future of Knowledge at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa.
