As the SDGs are unacknowledged by the public, we believed it was critical to incorporate the opinions of young people with little or no knowledge of the SDGs.
The UN has made tremendous progress towards implementing the SDGs with discussions at the High Level Political Forum and the General Assembly Open Working Groupwith UN Major Groups and other stakeholders. In Korea, ‘National SDGs’ (K-SDGs) and ‘Local SDGs’ (L-SDGs) were established to localise the mandate of the SDGs at national and local levels. However, the opinions of the youth were not sufficiently reflected in the process of defining K-SDGs and L-SDGs for Korea and Seoul.
We launched SDG Youth Research and ran a policy forum to capture the future generations' perception of the Seoul SDGs, which was run over 4 iterations with support of the Seoul Institute. Youth representatives from 54 youth member organizations participated in the forum. The discussions were documented in a 33-page report and delivered to the mayor of Seoul.
The key insights of the report focus on:
Through SYR, we have gained insight of what is needed to achieve SDGs in Korea. We have learned that it is much more effective to recommend SDG-friendly legislation, rather than simply give feedback on Seoul’s L-SDGs. As SDGs are unacknowledged by the public, we believed it was critical to incorporate the opinions of young people with little or no knowledge of the SDGs. As a result, a consortium was signed with the Capital Area Youth Culture Network (a community of youth volunteer organizations, youth media organizations, and youth artists groups) to launch the Youth-SDGs Korea Open Working Group (Y-SDGs Korea OWG).
Eight public meetings were held and led by 17 youth leaders to design Youth SDGs Korea and to apply them in daily lives. The ‘Youth SDGs Korea’ report will be delivered to the representatives of each political party and to various think tanks in late-2020.
Moving forward
We will continue to publish annual policy reports that monitors and tracks SDG-related policies from each political party. We hope that policy makers realize that people, especially future generations, are invested in sustainability and their engagement in SDG-related legislative activities will increase their chances of re-election. The Republic of Korea will be able to achieve SDGs through the legislative activities of National Assembly members with our guidance.