What Is It?
This goal is to ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all ages. The focal points, however, are on mothers and young children, the elderly, and those at risk of substance abuse or disease.
In terms of maternal mortality, the aim is to reduce the global maternal mortality ratio to less than 70 per 100 0000 live births by 2030. It is easy to understand the reason mothers are targeted as high-impact groups, as they are not only accounting for one life, but two.
Child mortality is also an important factor, with the UN committing to end preventable deaths of newborns and children under 5 years of age, with all countries aiming to reduce neonatal (newborn) mortality to at least as low as 1.2% of live births and under-5 mortality to at least as low as 2.5% of live births. Again, in terms of human rights, it is, of course, important to protect children, who cannot protect themselves. The distribution of mortality rates, is, as expected, quite unequal. Therefore, the UN and its partners work to find the geographical locations of the highest mortality rates and the implications of these locations.
The last extremely important pillar is healthcare - substance abuse, disease, and the elderly - to some extent - come under this. There are numerous measures in place to reduce the mortality rate stemming from disease, and increase the coverage of universal healthcare - including rehabilitation centers for substance abuse, support for the elderly, and, of course, financial support for developing treatments and vaccines for infectious diseases, made more prominent by Covid-19.
I think this is one of the most self-explanatory goals, in terms of what it is and why it’s important. Again, these goals tie in together - without eradicating poverty and providing measures for zero hunger (UNSDGs 1 and 2), this goal wouldn’t make sense, and vice versa.
How Does It Relate to Sustainability?
Before getting into how the general goal plays into sustainability, an interesting clause of the goal is that environmental health is one of the health aspects discussed. By 2030, the goal is to ’substantially reduce the number of deaths and illnesses form hazardous chemicals and air, water and soil pollution, and contamination’. While this does not explicitly discuss sustainability, it prioritizes the health of the environment. This is interesting from A sustainability angle, because being sustainable has the same end goal; to protect the planet. However, this comes from the angle of damage control, from the damage that is already done on a large scale. This is a very interesting approach, and while I won’t be discussing it further as I want to focus on what we can do on a much smaller scale, it is definitely interesting. If you want to learn more about it, you can do so here.
In terms of how the goal generally relates to sustainability, the obvious answer is something we’ve discussed in the previous two posts: If people are struggling to survive and be healthy, sustainability will not be a priority.
However, this specific goal brings an interesting angle into the mix. Promoting health and well-being can lend itself to sustainability quite well, given that a sustainable lifestyle is also a healthy one. it’s important to note here that the target audience for the UNSDG goal as a whole will be lower-income groups as they suffer the most from the issue of lack of health and well-being. However, in terms of what we can do, and the sustainability aspect we are considering, higher-income groups need to be targeted, as they are the ones who can afford a healthy lifestyle. However, there is still a market there, because there are high-income groups who can afford to be sustainable, but are not, leading to various health issues.
A common example is obesity - 13% of adults in the world are obese. That is more than 1 in 10 people being obese, which correlates with extremely bad health conditions regarding every aspect of the body, most importantly the heart. Having a sustainable lifestyle - for example, a sustainable diet, or sustainable modes of transport - would make a large difference. While this is not new knowledge, the issue comes from the ideas of extremes. Many think that to be sustainable when eating, you need to become vegan. While veganism is very sustainable, that scares a lot of people who have non-vegan food as a large part of their diet. If the idea was more about taking ‘baby steps’ and cutting out certain things at a time, it would be more palatable and make more sense. However, that is not the public perception of sustainability. It’s the same idea of sustainable transport - everyone knows public transport is sustainable, but the idea of ‘I need to sell my car so I can be sustainable’ is not going to work, but is what people think when they brush off sustainability as impossible.
What this goes to show is that framing is very important. Framing sustainability in its extremest form is not always the answer. This also shows that this goal coincides with sustainability in many different ways, with sustainability being the answer to higher-income sufferers of this issue.
What Can You Do?
In terms of what you can do about the goal itself, it’ll be helpful to refer to the other two posts I’ve done (1, 2) as if you simply want to contribute to the idea of improving the health of the general world, there are some ideas there in terms of donation and events to partake in. This again shows the interlinked nature of the goals.
However, about this specific goal, there are some things you can do in your community to promote sustainability for health and well-being maximization in higher income groups.
Create a sustainable meal plan for your own household
What is a sustainable meal plan? Try to figure out how to minimize the carbon emission of your meal. You can use the Greenome reviews to help you understand what is sustainable, or scroll down for a cool meal carbon emission calculator! Being conscious about what you are consuming, from a sustainability standpoint, will help, and doing this for your family makes them aware too! It’s also very accessible and adaptable to your eating habits - if you can reduce the steak one day a week and substitute it for a locally sourced meal, that’s progress! It’s all about not taking this to The extremes immediately, and getting scared off.
Pay attention to your favorite eateries - and educate!
Find the review template here. This will be a great way to get to know how sustainable - and how healthy - the places you frequent are!
Again, it is important to remember that we can make a difference in our own communities even with these large-scale goals. Taking action always has an impact.
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