Integrated sustainable development foundation

We live in times of far-reaching transformations, including changing climates and degrading ecosystems, as well as societies, economies, and the ways they are organized. Numbers of populations and environmental degradation are rapidly increasing and predominantly affect residents in the Global South, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia. This creates enormous challenges yet also opportunities to intervene with care and steer these transformations toward more just and sustainable futures.

Rapid Urbanization:

In 2050, two-thirds of the world’s population will live in urban areas.(1) To supply the estimated 6.7 billion urban residents by then with basic infrastructure to live in dignity and safety requires efforts across multiple dimensions.

Informal Housing:

Already today, more than one billion, or one in four people globally, live in inadequate, informal housing, and two billion lack access to basic sanitation, the majority of them in urban environments.(2)

Vulnerability to Environmental Threats:

The same world regions that experience rapid urbanization and a lack of adequate infrastructure are most vulnerable to the consequences of toxic pollution and climate change. In these places, resources for environmental restoration are most urgently needed.(3)

Lack of Technical Expertise:

Effectively addressing the complex conditions created by transformations of social and environmental systems mentioned above requires a widely distributed supply of technical expertise. However, most places across the Global South are generally under-resourced with such expertise, (4) coinciding with exceptionally young and fast-growing demographics.(5)

Against this backdrop, many rapidly developing places lack the necessary infrastructure and resources to adapt to the escalating impacts of degrading ecosystems, leading to service disruptions, food insecurity, public health impacts, and increased pressure on already stretched resources. The UN Sustainability Goals convey the complex interrelationships between these global challenges across different social, economic, political, and environmental dimensions. Despite good intentions, progress toward reaching these goals has been slow due to a lack of political will, insufficient investment, ineffective policies, and an absence of scalable models for inclusive and sustainable development.