The year 2015 was decisive for sustainable development. Based on intergovernmental negotiations, a list of goals was formulated showing barriers to sustainable development and setting goals for its implementation. These Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) resume and supplement the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that expired in 2015. The main focus of the MDGs was combating and eradicating hunger and poverty. This has to remain the central concern of the global community.
However, other global issues such as growing social inequality, increasing environmental devastation and resource use, intensifying climate change and lack of implementation of justice, peace, good governance and human rights must be addressed by all states in the future. Therefore, the SDGs focus on both the challenges in the areas of environment and development in the years to come. At the end of the negotiation process, the so-called Post-2015 Agenda was adopted at an UN Summit in September 2015. It is central for the implementation of the Post-2015
Agenda, that the goals apply both to the countries of the Global North as well as to those of the Global South.
Thus, donor nations have an obligation to reorganize their domestic policies as well as their development assistance while at the same time closely interlink these matters with regard to sustainable development.
The global intention to create goals for sustainable development is considerably complex. This study exemplifies
the way in which the proposed goals are intertwined with one another and, as an example, analyses the production
and consumption of tobacco products. The starting point of this study is the health effect of tobacco use. About one billion people smoke worldwide, 80 per cent of them reside in low and middle income countries. In Germany, about 20 million people smoke constituting 30 per cent of the population above 15 years (WHO 2015). Annually, about six trillion industrially manufactured cigarettes are consumed worldwide. Tobacco use is addictive, is hazardous to health and kills half of its consumers.
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