About this Research Topic

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Background

Building on the Millennium Development Goals, the UN Sustainable Development Goals are the cornerstone of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, billed by the UN as “An Agenda of unprecedented scope and significance.” The seventeen ambitious goals, which are intended to be reached by 2030, are conceived as integrated, indivisible, and as balancing the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development. They are organized around five core pillars:

• People: ending poverty and hunger and ensuring that all human beings can lead fulfilling lives in a healthy and dignified environment.
• Planet: protecting the environment while ensuring sustainable use and management of natural resources.
• Prosperity: ensuring environmentally sustainable economic growth, mutual prosperity, and decent work for all.
• Peace: building societies that are peaceful, just and inclusive, and in which human rights and gender equality are respected.
• Partnership: strengthening global solidarity to address inequalities within and between countries, by focusing on the needs of the most vulnerable.

This Research Topic addresses the eighth Sustainable Development Goal, which is to “Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all.” Progress toward this goal is measured by a number of individual targets and indicators.

The UN's most recent SDG progress report notes the dire impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on employment and the economy, resulting in the worst recession since the Great Depression. The report highlights that the pandemic has led to the loss of the equivalent of 255 million full-time jobs, four times more than were lost during the Global Financial Crisis. Global real GDP per capita, moreover, decreased by 5.3 per cent in 2020.

The economic impact of the COVID-19 crisis has hit young people, women, and those in the informal economy particularly hard. Of the world’s 2 billion informal workers before the pandemic, 1.6 billion were estimated to be significantly affected. Given their lack of social protections, the report notes their increased risk of falling into poverty. Among young people, meanwhile, an increase in those not employed, in school or in training is predicted.

As the global economy begins to recover, tremendous efforts will be needed to build back better in order to ensure decent, fulfilling and secure work for all within an environmentally sustainable economy.

The Research Topic will address the eighth Sustainable Development Goal from a communication-specific perspective. It will not only enquire into its global promulgation and into individual local, national and international communication programs in support of it, but will also consider the framing and elaboration of the goal, its adaptation to particular geographical contexts, stakeholder involvement in it, and media reporting on it.

Given the setbacks to the global economy from the coronavirus pandemic, this year’s edition of the Research Topic will focus particularly on the challenges and complexities of ensuring a sustainable economic recovery and decent work for all in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis.

Keywords: SDG, Sustainable Development Goals, towards 2030, decent work and economic growth

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Topic editors

fu-sheng tsai
Cheng Shiu University
Kaohsiung, Taiwan

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