 I'm Joshua Cooper and welcome to Aloha Sustainability in Hawaii and Peace in our Pacific. We're looking at the UN Sustainable Development Goals movement in Moana, New York, California. And today we're looking at UN SDGs guide for good acts for local authority and shop when not sifl providing a path for the Pacific Islands to impact the UN 2030 agenda. Thank you Lance for joining us so much today. Thank you for having me, Josh. I'm happy to be here. Today what we're going to look at which is so exciting is we're beginning a new show called Aloha Sustainability in Hawaii and what better guest can we have than a person with experience around the UN Sustainable Development Goals but also seeing their importance not just in our islands but in the international arena and around even the nation. Lance could you tell us a bit about why the Sustainable Development Goals are so important? Absolutely. The SDGs, the United Nations SDGs are an incredible set of priorities that the entire collection of UN member countries have agreed to support and advance. That in and of itself is quite astounding to have so many different member nations commit to a number of discrete goals to advance sustainability across a shared set of priorities for the globe. What's really important about the SDGs is they codify a set of measurable aspirational goals that will help us really make movement no matter where you are nationally. So very developed countries like the United States, many European nations have different types of targets than those that are struggling with earlier stages of development and perhaps less economic resource. What's really phenomenal about these goals though is that they've been designed to be implemented at a very localized level. So the predecessor for the Sustainable Development Goals were the series of goals captured within the Millennium Development Challenge or the Millennium Development Goals. Those were much larger things like reducing poverty, reducing infant mortality. Again, very important goals, but they were largely addressed at the nation-state level. So we're talking federal bureaucracies, ministerial bureaucracies, and very few frontline stakeholders who were facing these sustainability challenges had an opportunity or a hand in addressing them. What's really exciting about the SDGs and what's called Agenda 2030, which is the goal of really making significant progress on all of these goals by 2030, is that they are explicitly designed to involve and engage local stakeholders. So everyday people have an opportunity to contribute to these SDGs. And in fact, there's an explicit mandate that I'll talk about later as they relate to the Seafall Global Network and many of the other UN agencies that are actively promoting local stakeholder involvement. So an example of this is clean water, very important SDG. All of us want clean water. All of us need clean water. What it means to address clean water priorities in one country can be very different than another, but everyone can have a hand in addressing water quality, reporting issues in water quality, helping to clean waterways from extant pollution, obvious instances of pollution, but then it obviously also extends to more sophisticated interventions. Some of those in the private sector, some of those in the governmental sector, but everyone has a role to play. And I think that's the really exciting thing about these SDGs is they're easy to understand. They're easy to relate to. They resonate with everyone because they are plainly important. Climate action, equality, gender equality, reduced inequalities, poverty. These are things that people can understand immediately. And then they of course are also broken down into much more discrete targets that people can rally around and put their own resources towards addressing and solving. One of the big water quality issues here in Hawaii, as you know, Josh, is the red hill contamination. This is a major series of underground containers or what's the word I'm looking for, reservoirs of fuel that have been leaking into our underground aquifer. And so it was really largely a local response. Regular people, particularly those who are directly affected by this contamination that led to a major change in policy by the military and really led to some major changes in the way that we address contaminants in water quality. So that's a really localized example here in Hawaii of how we are taking action on something like clean water and ensuring that we advance those priorities in local stakeholder concerns. Lance, that was actually perfect because I remember when we were creating the SDGs and the advocacy from 2012 at the Rio Plus 20 Earth Summit and then from 2013 to 2015 that governments coming together, the civil society coming together, the major groups and agreeing on the 17 global goals and then the 169 targets as well as well as the indicators. And on our forget President Obama at the time, he said, we don't have to go across a border, we can just go across a bridge saying that what really that you were sharing with us that was so insightful is the millennium development goals are sort of more top down. It was sort of this is what you developing countries need. And but the two things they said with the sustainable development goals with the 2030 agenda with everyone everywhere on earth as an opportunity to organize and be part of this movement. And as you said, it's common, it's even a common new language, you can almost talk about these goals among cultures with the boxes and with the different logos to then just thrive and everyone knows, oh, yes, we have the exact same. And you're really good example of SDG number six on clean water and sanitation, talking about what has been happening in Hawaii shows that it might be different in each place, but everyone has that right to clean healthy water and that we have to then be able to take actions at our home to then make sure that we're also in line with the global agenda that all of the governments, as you said, agree, every government agreed in September of 2015. I remember the pope being there as well, saying that this is a new way forward for the world. But we're all speaking the same language and we know what we're talking about. It's not a different track for some people in the Pacific and a different track for the Arctic. We have one planet and we have one island earth. And together, these 17 goals provide the steps of how we can all participate and be part of this process to preserve and protect our planet. But make sure also that all people are respected on earth as well. And as you described it, looking at discrimination, looking at clean water, looking at renewable energy, at ending poverty and zero hunger, all of these are connected and not to see them in silos, which I think is also fresh as we get into Shamanah later. We're getting different levels of academia, different departments to all say together we have an insight to these challenges and we can be a solution at the university and an engine for real positive quality and more importantly as you are getting into equity. So these SDGs are an amazing new step forward. This is not your first experience with sustainable development goals. Maybe you can share in some places where you have been involved and how you've seen them have upon promising practice and what that then can bring to Hawaii as we're looking at how to actualize the 17 global goals in the 2030 agenda at home in Hawaii. Well said, Josh. I want to respond to your question, but you've inspired me a little bit talking about kind of the equity of the SDGs. That's a really important point. And the fact that everyone is being held to the same macro goals, even though some of the targets might be a little bit different or interpreted differently at the at the nation state level, I think it really does show that we are all in this together and it's an integration that we really have never had on issues of sustainability cross-border and obviously on a global stage. The other issue though is these are very empowering and I say that on a micro level. So I'm a linguist, but I teach a class called communicating sustainability to students here at Chamanan University. And you would perhaps believe, but maybe be surprised at the degree to which students find it relieving to be able to articulate not only goals that we have locally, that they can address in small ways in their daily lives or in their larger peer groups, but that they connect and articulate to these big global challenges that seem so overwhelming. And you know, our young people today in particular are facing this sort of existential dread of a changing climate and an unsustainable future. And I think what the SDGs provide in many respects are tangible opportunities for people of all backgrounds to say, look, we can make small progress on these enormous overwhelming global challenges. And it makes them feel better about, you know, some of the very difficult issues that we all share and that we all face. So I think that's just a very important point I should have mentioned earlier. Thank you for inspiring me to share it. This has not been a new phenomenon for me in terms of working with the SDGs. I've been fortunate enough to serve as a United Nations Fellow for about a decade through the UN Institute for Training and Research. So this is one of the larger UN entities. It has a number of smaller units underneath that umbrella. But UNITAR, as it's known, is a very important vehicle for implementing the SDGs. In fact, it is the only United Nations agency whose sole purpose it is to educate and help implement the SDGs specifically. All of the UN agencies have a role in operationalizing the SDGs in one form or another. But what's interesting about UNITAR, because of its, you know, its training and research mission, it really has been transformed into the primary educational vehicle for the SDGs. And part of that mandate involves something called the SEAFALL Global Network. SEAFALL is a French acronym. And it really translates as international centers for training local experts. And what that means in practicality is these SEAFALL centers, there are now 24 of them around the world. And these SEAFALL centers are responsible for providing education, training and research insights to help local people, experts, and they may be trained experts or they may be novice experts that are developing expertise, train them to address the SDGs in their own communities. So again, it's about taking those global priorities that were so important to the Millennium Development Goals and giving local people on the front lines who are often facing the brunt of these sustainability challenges, giving them the tools, the knowledge, the empowerment to solve some of these challenges themselves. Now my experience with the SEAFALL Global Network again goes back about eight, nine years. And it started with a previous iteration of the leadership of UNITAR. So the previous assistant secretary general and executive director of UNITAR was Sally Fagan-Wiles. And Sally has done some amazing work in really promoting the SEAFALL Global Network, expanding its size. And that work has continued under the current assistant secretary general, Nikhil Seth. What's important about that leadership is that these are people who have been involved in sustainability within the United Nations for 30 plus years. Nikhil himself was one of many important architects for Agenda 2030. He wrote some of the initial outlines and draft white papers that led to the current iterations of the SDGs and Agenda 2030. And so the opportunity to work with some of these global luminaries is really, really important for our constituency, the people of Hawaii, the people of the Pacific, peoples of the Pacific, and giving them the opportunity to draw on incredible expertise that again goes back long before sustainability was so sexy, was so top of mind for much of the rest of the world. And it's important that we draw lessons from many of our here SEAFALL centers around the world. So again, there are 24 of them. They all have slightly different areas to focus. Our center here in the Pacific is obviously focused on island communities and some of the unique challenges that we face in island communities, also many communities that deal with multicultural and particularly indigenous communities that have been marginalized and disenfranchised. And so we have, of course, a different set of priorities for education, training, empowerment through research innovation than, for example, a center in Belgium or a center in Malaga, Spain, both of which do excellent work but very different types of work. My own experience with SEAFALL actually precedes the establishment of our center here in Honolulu. I actually had the opportunity to serve on the board and then later chair SEAFALL Atlanta, which was the very first North American SEAFALL center, was the first American based SEAFALL center. And it was a wonderful example of a SEAFALL center focused on civil and human rights. So Atlanta, of course, is an important location with some very significant history related to the American civil rights movement. And it's now home to so many major institutions focused on the American civil rights movement, which continues in terms of its priorities and struggles for equality and reconciliation. And so entities like SEAFALL Atlanta can teach us a lot about techniques and strategies at the local level for engendering support for priorities like civil and human rights. And we can expand those to some of the bigger priorities here in Hawaii around environmental justice, around ecological restoration. There was a wonderful discussion recently highlighted in the paper this morning about this new green fee for Hawaii, which would be the first example of a financial investment in Hawaii's ecological future. There are many examples around the world and even some around the country of innovative approaches to policy solutions and just kind of grassroots support for resolving some of these common challenges that we face. And so I think what's really valuable as we move forward is we've been able to rally a lot of these other experts that have a lot more experience in this space than we do here at SEAFALL Honolulu. We're new to this engagement. We've got a lot of partners locally, but what's really important is that we can draw up on that legacy and that history of efficacy across so many domains of sustainability. And we're hoping to really tap into that over the next decade here. It's actually perfect and it's tempting and I just want to be in the class. So it's great to see that not only acting as provost, but also public policy making on a global scale, but then just the classroom. It would be so exciting to talk about communication and sustainability. And as you said, now students can see the 17 goals. If they want to look at other countries, it's not trying to find something somewhere. Every country is all in agreement of looking at these goals. And then as you described it, the different aspects here in Geneva now right across from the Unitar. And there's so many acronyms, right? And in America, people only maybe know UNICEF because of trick-or-treat in Halloween. But as you were talking about, there's so many UN agencies, UNESCO, UN women that are really so valuable to life and death for people all around the planet. And Unitar is just one of those UN specialized agencies, programs, and funds. But you went into such depth to describe its significance for society to see how it can serve. And then I really like the point that you're bringing up at the end of really decarbonizing, but also decolonizing. And that in a way, Seafolk, Hawaii is new, but has a lifetime of memory. In fact, Indigenous peoples had most of this knowledge and it's relearning. And it's what you were sharing that I think you know also from your experience in linguistics, it's respecting the Indigenous host culture that has the insights in a way maybe the keys to the future. That's one of more balance that has been trying to share that, but hasn't been listening. The world hasn't. But UN Sustainable Developmental is a 2030 agenda is one avenue that we can all pursue together. And as you were talking about the students, it also plugs them into the global process. It's not what work can I do or what can I be if they're purposeful, if they have a life of meaning and they want to be part of this global movement, they can do actions daily in the class, on campus, in the community, at the Hawaii state capitol, as you're sharing the new aspect with Governor Green is proposing, and then make a difference in Hawaii, but then compare that and be able to learn, as you're saying, many other countries, what we're facing in Hawaii isn't only happening to Hawaii. So the Seafol network allows all of us to sort of have people who are peers around the planet saying, hey, we're looking at this, what do you think? And what have you done? And then as you said, Malaga might be doing something amazing and the Netherlands might be doing something well, but we in Hawaii might also have a story to share. And the best part is Hawaii is now part of a piece of that global puzzle, thanks to the work of Green Seafol to Honolulu. Also, as you pointed out, Atlanta, that was a huge step too. And I just was meeting with the new US ambassador, and she had a huge role in Atlanta before, and she's going to come to a human rights cities leadership conference in May. And she said she's hosting people from the museum right now here in Geneva. So it's that whole aspect of everyone everywhere has a part of the story can now speak the same language. And that puts us to where we're at today where you've already done an amazing job of bringing a UN undersecretary general, who as you said, is really an architect, has his heart in this game. And I was so inspired by his speech at the launch that you did at the end of November and early December, he had a couple of keynotes, but I also remember meeting in last year. And he was saying, this is, I think I remember, we need a blow torch. And we've got to take action now. And to hear a UN undersecretary general have that perspective, I think is refreshing as well for people, indigenous as you were saying, but also people of the Pacific, who know that climate is an existential threat, who don't want to have more talk, as he said, but actually taking tasks and doing action. And so that puts us where we are now, that we have a new seafold shaman as you described, our work is to do education and training, and being a unit for unity. And part of the real the larger Ohana of Moana, New York. Yeah, maybe you can share with us a bit about what's been going on. I thought that was one panel getting back to your teaching, we had people who are graduates, students who are graduates who are now working in all these SDGs. And we can maybe share how the students can be part of that, but also the faculty. And then together, seafold shaman can bring together even the capital, as you brought in Josh Green, when he was lieutenant governor now governor, to really make sure that we're all partners for the global goals, which is global goals 17. Well, thank you, Josh. Yes, we are incredibly humbled and very enthusiastic about this new United Nations Center seafold Honolulu and hosted on our campus here at shaman on. And I guess what really made sense to us about the proposal to establish the center we were approached by Unitar by the United Nations, and really invited to propose a center and and host the center here at shaman on it. And we went through a lot of discernment to make sure that that was the right decision. We wanted to make sure that if we were going to initiate something like this, that we could do it with integrity. And we could do it from a place of partnership. To be clear, we don't see ourselves as, you know, the leaders or the example for sustainability in Hawaii, we see ourselves as a vehicle and a facilitator for other people, we want to empower other people. And that was really what led us to establish seafold Honolulu. We saw the seafold endeavor as an opportunity to continue what we have been doing our entire history as an institution of higher education. And that is to empower people through education, to empower the people of Hawaii through education and more specifically to empower those who are oftentimes marginalized and not given opportunity at decision making tables to have the knowledge and the preparation and the formation to be effective in those spaces. And so what's really compelling about the seafold Honolulu endeavor is that, you know, we have said from the outset that we are looking to partner with other organizations here in Hawaiian across the Pacific that have been doing incredible work much longer than we have. And we are, you know, committed to sustainability, but we're really looking to find synergies with both private sector nonprofit, private sector for profit business, as well as the governmental sector to see if we can amplify or otherwise expand the impact that they're having. And so we want to be a multiplier, not a, you know, another duplication of what people might already be doing. And most importantly, we want to learn from our host culture and the very beautiful multicultural fabric of Hawaii in the Pacific. We have so many peoples here, so many cultural perspectives, so many languages I always like to appreciate as a linguist. And there's so much to be discovered still in terms of best practices for ecological stewardship for sustainability in general. I think part of our mission in mandate is to really listen carefully and ensure that we are identifying alternative approaches that are either better or just alternative ways of accomplishing the same goals that resonate with peoples of the Pacific communities. And one of the, you know, one of the excellent examples of this, you mentioned the student panel. So we had a major inauguration for our center, which also served as a annual meeting for all of the Seafall Centers around the world. So we hosted really about 35 diplomats from around the world, several of them from Geneva, from the UN headquarters in Geneva. And that included Nikhil Seth, our assistant secretary general. And the idea was to talk about our shared priorities, but also we were allowed to showcase some of what we were prioritizing here in Hawaii. And what was really striking before I talked to you about the student panel, what was really striking and hearing from Nikhil, the assistant secretary general, but also all of the other Seafall leaders was how much they were impressed with Hawaii's approach to managing these problems. And so we had a number of our partners from the East West Center, University of Hawaii, Pacific Asian Affairs Council, which works with high school students and so many others. We had them come and talk about their approaches and our shared approaches to solving problems here in Hawaii. And I think it really left a tremendous impression on our global partners through the Seafall Global Network that there are different ways to bring people together and to solve differences and disagreements in ways that, you know, are very inclusive that give opportunities for all voices to be heard in ways that they might not otherwise be familiar with. I heard a lot from my colleagues about the heart, the authenticity of the approaches that we used. We had a beautiful welcome ceremony from some of our senior cultural practitioners here in Hawaii that really grounded our meeting and our discussion in an understanding of our place within the I know within the environment within the earth. And I think that really set the tone for the rest of our meeting and our showcase. But back to our students. Now these are our students, but our endeavors are not limited to shaman on students, we just wanted to showcase the legacy that we have. So we have thousands of shaman on alumni across the Pacific Islands. And we had a panel, a virtual panel that showcased many of those alumni who are working back in their home communities of American Samoa, and yeah, and Guam, and talking about the work that they're doing on a local level and how their training and formation at shaman on and you know the unique ethos that we engender here of kind of a holistic values based educational approach is informing that work and how they're partnering with Seafall Honolulu to again expand the impact. So the goal that we have here is to partner with local stakeholders, whether they're experts at the at the beginning or they want to become experts and really help them tool up so that they can have more impact in in ways that are important to them. I think what's really maybe innovative about about some of our work right now is we're looking to see how we can adapt some of the SDGs in ways that make more sense to local communities. And by that, I mean, when you're talking about climate action with, you know, some of our partners in the Marshall Islands, we're going to be meeting with some leaders from the College of the Marshall Islands later this week. And when we talked to them about some of the partnerships, they're they're really concerned about existential, you know, challenges. They can't talk about the other SDGs without talking about mitigating rising seas and the climate action priorities that they have. And so it really contextualizes the broader fabric of the 17 SDGs. When you're working with communities that are facing, you know, existential ends as a result of one or two of these sustainability challenges. The other really important and I think Hallmark approach that we'll be taking with Seafall Honolulu relates to data. So we have the state's first undergraduate data science analytics and visualization program. Now there are additional programs that have grown sense, but we have continued to invest, not just in data science generally, but in data science that is specifically useful to local communities. And so our data science program has a number of outreach initiatives that are focused on indigenous communities, on other marginalized communities and helping them get control of their data for their communities so that they can make compelling arguments for policy change to governmental stakeholders like Governor Green, who's been an enormous supporter of our Seafall Honolulu Center and who has championed better data driven decision making across government, but also across the private sector. And so one of our priorities through a new National Science Foundation grant is going to be empowering Pacific communities through a number of data science initiatives, both credentialed and kind of community driven, giving them the technological tools to kind of collate masses amounts of data. So health records, environmental degradation, sea level rise in ways that measure erosion and other types of local impacts on their island communities. And so they've got a lot of data, they just can't make sense of it because they don't have the tools to really analyze and synthesize it into useful information. And so that's going to be a major initiative as we move forward and it's funded through a number of concomitant grants that will help us have more impact. We've actually partnered with all of the local colleges, many of them two year colleges across the Pacific Island region to make sure that we have local partners who can implement a lot of this on the ground and then feedback information to us about what needs to be adapted or changed to improve impact. So much to share there and it's so exciting. I'm so glad this new series of Aloha, Sustainability in Hawaii and Peace in our Pacific, we'll cover all the global goals all 17 and you really are sharing the UN Sustainable Development Goals movement in Moana, New York here and we can think of SIPO as really kalo that we're now planting that will have many offshoots that then we'll be able to be nourishing all of the people of Hawaii but around Oceania and we see us as a great beginning and thank you so much Lance for taking time to share with us today really what's going on and to see how Sifo Shaman is providing a path for Pacific Islands to impact the UN 2030 agent, Mahalo. Mahalo, thank you Josh. Mahalo.