A new Center for Sustainable Development launched this week, headed up by Canadian senior advisor to the UN Foundation, John McArthur. 

Hosted by The Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., the Center will focus on five central priorities, McArthur said in a digital launch event Wednesday morning: defining the challenge of meeting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), identifying tools for sustainable development globally, promoting action on the SDGs in local communities around the world, advancing financing for sustainable development, and advancing American governmental and civil society leadership for the goals. 

The Center’s fellows are focused on climate action, sustainable infrastructure, inclusive growth, global governance, the future of work, job mobility, U.S. global development policies, extreme poverty, local cooperation on the SDGs, and global COVID-19 recovery. “All of this is our starting point,” McArthur said during the launch event. “Before long, we hope the Center can extend its focus to grow its team and take on new topics — things like gender equality, things like private sector contributions to the SDGs writ large.” 

While the Center will focus partially on U.S. governance, its scope is global — and McArthur tells Future of Good in an interview that its work will reinforce Canada’s role in the global effort to reach the SDGs. “What are we doing to share the burden of helping to end extreme poverty? What are we doing to carry our share of the burden on greenhouse gas emissions?” McArthur asks. Canada has made progress on some of this work, he says, but needs to be working “much more systematically” if the country is to meet 2030 targets. “We need to be thinking about, in a country of more than 35 million people, how to harness the nation’s resources — academic, scientific, at the provincial and territorial level.” He also stressed the importance of the business world’s cooperation. 

To this end, as inaugural director of the Center, McArthur says his work in Canada informs his belief in the power of “connecting disparate and diverse people to cooperate.”

“I think of Canada and the Canadian challenges as emblematic of the world’s challenges — because we’re not a superpower. We don’t have the influence certain countries have. We do get caught in the middle. We do, in many ways, have to be more strategic about how we use our public and private resources to solve problems, both at home and abroad,” McArthur says. “Maybe it’s idealistic, but I’m trained — I almost feel like it’s a cultural value — to think about how everyone around the world perhaps sees this [global challenge] differently.”

Communities across Canada are feeling the impacts of converging crises. “I’m from Vancouver,” McArthur says. “Vancouver, right now, is living the interface of so many global issues. It’s at the intersection between climate change, natural resources, real estate and housing costs, the opioid crisis, great power conflicts and Indigenous rights and reconciliation — it’s all there, even in my hometown, the world’s issues are coming to the fore. I believe that is representative of what every community is feeling in some way.”

Many of these issues, of course, have been exacerbated by the pandemic. Speaking at the digital launch event for the Center, Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations Amina J. Mohammed urged the Center to make sure youth and women — two of the most disproportionately impacted groups — are at decision-making tables. “Leadership is already being demonstrated by young people and by women,” she said, “and so I think your convening also needs to show a different face.” 

Also speaking at the event, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation CEO Mark Suzman called on the Center to do more work on gender equity, which he called “the critical development intersection of our time.” Rockefeller Foundation (a funder of the Center) President Rajiv Shah encouraged the Center to focus on financing for sustainable development, and identifying ways to come up with the trillions needed to address the climate crisis. 

The challenges communities face at the intersection of COVID-19 and the climate crisis “will not be solved by any single actor,” McArthur tells Future of Good. “So the role that we play is both convening leaders from all different walks of life, sectors and specialties, but also then promoting, identifying and advocating for problem solving.”

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