2022 in the rear view mirror

When we summarise 2022, there is a lot to be proud of.

One of the highlights of the year is our involvement in the UN Stockholm +50 Conference: A healthy planet for the prosperity of all. We arranged the associated event and global SDSN member meeting “Acting for a healthy planet: Environmental Science-Policy Solutions and Pathways” together with SDSN Kenya. We also supported the global SDSN and the OECD Development Assistance Committee to arrange the associated event “Mobilizing international financing to restore and accelerate Sustainable Development Goal progress“. In addition, we participated in the Stockholm Trio (Karolinska Institutet, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and Stockholm University) meeting “Sustainable planet, sustainable health – how science-based solutions can drive transformative change”. Finally, we participated in the Stockholm +50 Conference and met up with several members, which is always very valuable to us.

Our involvement in Stockholm +50 led to a collaboration with UN Environment Programme (UNEP) to disseminate their calls for the next Global Environmental Outlook (GEO) 7 report to all the SDSN members worldwide. UNEP would like to see the next GEO report as the “Solutions GEO” and sees the SDSN as an important partner in this work. We hope to see many SDSN-originated solutions in the next GEO report.

In our strategic work on increasing global collaborations, we also enabled our colleagues in SDSN Great Lakes to participate in the high-level meeting in the Sweden-East Africa University Network. We welcomed Simone Cresti, Network Manager of the SDSN Mediterranean for a 1.5-week training visit. We held a presentation and a demonstration of the SDG Impact Assessment Tool for SDSN Hong Kong. We had ongoing discussions with the networks SDSN Australia, New Zealand and Pacific, SDSN Canada, and SDSN USA around developing best practices for SDG reporting at Universities and Voluntary University reviews.

As always, our member activities are very important to us. In addition to the global member meeting, we arranged three SDSN Northern Europe member exclusive webinars on themes such as “Challenge and action-oriented learning – engaging students in sustainability work“, “Sustainable Lifestyles“, and “Academic flying“. A lot of our members have also this year started to explore the SDG Impact Assessment Tool for their research and education. About 20 members have joined our workshops on the tool during the year. Many universities and other knowledge institutions already use the tool regularly.

During the year, the SDG Impact Assessment Tool reached more than 15 000 registered users worldwide. To make it even easier for users, we produced three instruction videos on how to use the tool. To meet the global demand, we also started translating the tool to more languages and were able to launch the site in Swedish, Spanish and French during the year. We hope that this will enable even more people around the world to contribute to the transformation to a sustainable society.

Watch the instruction videos for the SDG Impact Assessment Tool >>

In August, we welcomed our new Member Coordinator Hilda Klingvall. We are so happy to have her in our team.

Finally, we would like to thank all our members for a great collaboration during the year. Member engagement is crucial for a network and we are very happy that so many of you have joined our member meetings, shared your knowledge and engaged in discussions. We also want to thank  the University of Gothenburg and Chalmers University of Technology, our two hosts of the SDSN Northern Europe secretariat via the Gothenburg Centre for Sustainable Development.

For next year, we are working on a new initiative for municipalities, we are exploring how to achieve even more interactive member meetings, we want to arrange an online member conference, launch more languages for the SDG Impact Assessment Tool, and more… Welcome to join our mission to support the implementation of the SDGs!

/The team at SDSN Northern Europe secretariat

Martin, Hilda, Nina, and Anders