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Twenty-five youths from the eight counties of ENCN firstly listened to a presentation by the Executive Secretary of the BSSSC, Lars Lund Godbolt. Advocating and implementing the SDGs is one of four prioritized policy areas in our work plan 2017-2018. He presented the SDGs and how the BSSSC work with them through the Council of the Baltic Sea States’ (CBSS) Baltic 2030 action plan.  

The presentation focused on the history of work on sustainability in the United Nations leading up to the 2030 goals, and emphasized how interlinked the SDGs are – how one will affect another. Then Mr. Godbolt presented the CBSS Baltic 2030 Action plan and how the 17 SDGs are divided into six categories. The category “Partnership for the Goals” (SDG 17) was explained to the youths before they were divided into the remaining five categories.

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- Transition to a Sustainable Economy (SDGs 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 12 and 14)

- Climate Action (SDG 13)

- Equality and Social Wellbeing for All (SDGs 1, 2, 3, 5, 10 and 16)

- Creating Sustainable and Resilient Cities (SDG 11)

- Quality Education and Lifelong Learning for All (SDG 4)

The workshop was divided into two sessions where the youths would go to a new category for session two.
 

1. Discovering the challenges

   1. What problems and challenges are there within your category?

   2. Could other SDGs be related to your category?

   3. Mention five areas within your category and evaluate them on how we are doing (define your area – Norway, Baltic Sea Region - or world?)  

 

1. Solving the challenges

   1. Do you agree with the former group’s assessments?

   2. How can we solve these challenges?

   3. Find concrete solutions.
       

After the sessions, each group had a presentation followed with a discussion with the rest of the youths.

The youths came to a range of clever and creative different solutions to the wide range of challenges the SDGs represent. They all realized how the SDGs are connected and therefore presented concrete actions that could fit will into several of the categories.

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Climate action / Transition to a Sustainable Economy / Creating Sustainable and Resilient Cities:

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- Educate people on sustainability to change the mindset of people
- Educate people for greener sectors, not fossil based industries
- Recycling by law
- More biogas busses and electrical busses
- Enhance and expand the public transportation
- More solar power (in sunnier countries than Norway)
- Environmental certification on buildings.

- Sustainable fishing by law

- Introduce green tax to make greener action more lucrative

 

Equality and Social Wellbeing for All

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• Include refugees by inviting them to informal ‘buddy groups’ and other social activities

• Reduce the wage gap between rich and poor by taxes and a social welfare model

• Reducing the wage gap between men and women – the group suggested gender quotas, but the group disagreed if this was a good idea.

• Free education for all

• International: keep out of wars.

• To continue and increase development aid to poorer countries

• Normalize the fact that there are four biological and seven social sexes.

• Norway should set demands to the companies representing the products we import to make sure the working conditions for the workers are adequate.
   

Education

• States must prioritize education

• Learn more about digitalization in school

• Free education for all

• Customized education – so everyone’s included

• Strong research institutions – especially on sustainability

• Build more libraries

• Economical support when needed (for poorer students)

• Norway should help create and support educational institutions in poorer countries

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The BSSSC will have the youth’s ideas in mind in our continuous work with the SDGs. We will also continue to work with SDGs and youth in combination and will hopefully see some of these youths at our Youth Event spring 2018 (date to be confirmed) and/or at the EUSBSR Forum in Tallinn 2018.

 

Read more about the CBSS Baltic 2030 here. 

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Read more about BSSSC Youth work here.