CODS: A center for a sustainable world

The Center for Sustainable Development Objectives for Latin America and the Caribbean (CODS-LAC for its acronym in Spanish) opened in 2018. Alejandro Gaviria, the ex-minister of health and ex-director of the center talks about the actions that are underway to consolidate it and about what this difficult and problematic concept means that is filled with tension and even contradictions.

The documentary Magia Salvaje is an excellent photo album of Colombian diversity, but it transmits the wrong idea as it omits the interaction between man and nature. Conservation needs a better understanding of the relations between the human species and its environment.

Based on this controversial assessment, Alejandro Gaviria explains that the Center for Sustainable Development Objectives he directs was born out of the urgency to leave aside the clichés and the rhetoric to be able to concentrate on a realistic context. This would seek to foster a compatible relationship between economic development, social progress, and sustainability. SDGs are an invitation to understand the complexity and not to ignore it.

To be able to understand these difficulties, in 2018 the center focused on prioritizing which of these 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) established by the United Nations are priorities for Latin America and the Caribbean. They also tried to draw up an action plan for the next five years.

With a certain irony, Gaviria signals that, “Just like almost everything in life, this needs coherence between the objectives that may be very grandiloquent and certainly some reduced resources. It is not easy to change the world from a desk in Bogota”.

Priorities for Latin America

Alejandro Gaviria likes to use the words of Michael Reid —regional editor of the The Economist— about Latin America being the forgotten continent because, “the global economy’s center of gravity is moving towards the East. We say that China and Australia are far away. But we are the ones who are far away. Latin America runs the risk of being left out of great flows of commerce and capital and being outside the exchange of ideas”.

Taking into consideration this risk, and after having analyzed the context that this is a continent of cities with a huge amount of biodiversity, highly unequal, and very violent, four priorities were chosen:

1. Sustainable cities. This involves issues such as quality of air and transportation and how to achieve equality: not necessarily distributing income but wellbeing.
2. Balance between responsible agroindustry and looking after the environment and protecting ecosystems. The region is the world’s most biodiverse nature reserve; however, countries such as Brazil and Argentina are big players in global agricultural markets. In Colombia, this tension can be found in the efforts being made to develop the Orinoquia region.
3. Renewable energies and climate change (a global issue not just a regional one). The center will seek to advance decarbonization through changing the energy matrix in the country and the region.
4. Peace, justice, and solid institutions.

Actions to be taken

To make progress with these priorities, in 2018 the directors of CODS-LAC defined three types of actions to be taken: research, education, and exerting influence.

In terms of research, a network of researchers from Latin America is being established that functions as a meeting point for experts from various disciplines and from various countries. Their first meeting in April 2019 was a seminar on sustainable cities in Santiago de Chile. This strategy intends to break down two recurrent barriers universities in the region have: their microscopic vision (each researcher is hyperspecialized in their own area), and the very local viewpoint, which impedes understanding the Latin American reality. “Global dissatisfaction and the loss of trust in institutions should attract the attention of academia, which began to enter into dialogue with itself—to self-reference. But it cannot be an industry of citations; the market of ideas needs to have more diverse contact with the world”, maintains Alejandro Gaviria.

CODS-LAC will offer online courses that are to be hosted on the Coursera platform. The first two will be offered in the second half of 2019 and will focus on SDGs in general and SDGs in the private sector. They are also translating and contextualizing several of Jeffrey Sachs’ twenty-five online courses from the University of Colombia.

In terms of exerting an influence, a solid diffusion strategy has already begun that includes the creation of a podcast, a news bulletin, an invitation for journalists and surveys to measure how accepted environmental policies are, as well as participation in public debates. A competition on environmental issues is also being devised.

The University node

CODS’ foundations are based on an alliance between the following universities: Los Andes, Javeriana, and Universidad del Norte (Colombia); Universidad Católica de Chile; Autónoma de México and TEC de Monterrey (México); Universidad del Pacífico (Peru); Universidad de Campinas (Brazil); and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT for its acronym in Spanish) (Colombia).

Manuel Rodríguez-Becerra is a Colombian ex Minister of the Environment and a full professor at the Universidad de los Andes. Together with professors working in the areas of social and environmental sustainability (in the Faculty of Business Management), he led the establishment of the Center in Colombia.