The 2013 Parliamentary Hearing was held at United Nations Headquarters on 14 and 15 November. It was organized jointly by the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the President of the General Assembly, and the President of the Economic and Social Council, and brought together close to 200 parliamentarians from a range of countries to discuss the theme “Re-thinking sustainable development: the quest for a...

The negotiations on the SDG goals and targets, leading to the sustainable development Declaration in September 2015, are now in the final stages. Ensuring that people with mental disorders are not left behind in the global development program from 2015 to 2030 will require specific and explicit commitments and targets against which progress in mental health can be measured and reported. The arg...

Background The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is a globally accepted developmental agenda, and it is expected that everyone everywhere in the world would be aware, knowledgeable and be willing to contribute to its attainment. This study aims to assess the level of awareness, knowledge of, and attitudes towards the SDGs among members of a university community. Methods A cross-sectional s...

What is sustainable development? Since its inception at the 1992 Earth Summit, “sustainable development” has been woven into the language of development and global change. Recognising that past development paradigms have been fixated on economic growth, marginalising social and environmental dimensions of progress, the concept of “sustainable development” has attempted to reconcile all three de...

The Global strategy for women’s, children’s and adolescents’ health (2016–2030) provides a roadmap for ending preventable deaths of women, children and adolescents by 2030 and helping them achieve their potential for and rights to health and well-being in all settings.1 The global strategy has three objectives: survive (end preventable deaths); thrive (ensure health and well-being); and transfo...

Three of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) concerned health. There is only one health goal in 17 proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Critiques of the MDGs included missed opportunities to realise positive interactions between goals. Here we report on an interdisciplinary analytical review of the SDG process, in which experts in diff erent SDG areas identifi ed potential i...

Increasing cases of birth defects has been a worldwide problem for decades. According to the available reports, most of the birth defects were induced by exogenous factors including environmental, chemical or physical factors. As most of these problems are life-threatening and might cause lifelong disability, the concern on reducing the incidences of birth defects has been proportionally increa...

An international science program titled “Digital Belt and Road (DBAR)” was launched in Beijing last year, aiming for the sustainable development of the Belt and Road region using Earth observation big data. This presentation firstly introduces China’s Earth observation satellites including the four remote sensing satellite series, a high-resolution Earth observation system and other Earth obser...

This paper is aiming at illustrating the potential of ICT for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals which were declared by the United Nations in 2015 as binding for all nations of our planet addressing both developing and developed countries. ICT must play a significant role if the SDGs should be achieved as projected in 2030. The paper gives an overview of some of the existing efforts in...