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10:44

What Are Human Rights and Why Do We Need Them?

Joshua Castellino addresses why the world needs human rights. He questions how the order that is created by governmental and social systems pays attention to justice. He traces the history of justice from Ancient Greece to the present day and outlines the four primary reasons that the world needs human rights. How can human beings access their rights? How do we prioritize rights? This video is licensed under the CC BY-NC-SA license.

10:59

A Brief History of the SDGs

This chapter presents the origins of the SDGs, how they arose and why? The chapter conveys the core idea that clear goal-setting is essential for progress and examines the process through which the SDGs were established. Dr. Sachs begins a discussion of historic development by reaching back several decades to the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (1972) to the Millennium Development Goals to the present. This video is licensed under the CC BY-NC-SA license.

10:28

Transparency and Access to Information

This chapter examines the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative and other efforts promoting transparency and public access to information as means of preventing and recovering from conflict. It considers how transparency and access to information can help prevent conflict by helping to fight corruption, manage expectations, encourage participatory monitoring, empower people, and promote open communications. This video is licensed under the CC BY-NC-SA license.

12:24

Introducing Sustainable Development

In this chapter, Professor Jeffrey Sachs introduces the course "Sustainable Development: the Post-Capitalist Order" and defines sustainable development. This video is licensed under the CC BY-NC-SA license. Please give attribution to the SDG Academy.

14:35

Why Sustainable Development is Important: Happiness and Wellbeing

This chapter describes why the concept of sustainable development is so important, why it is so important that we orient towards the three objectives of prosperity, social fairness, and environmental sustainability. This video is licensed under the CC BY-NC-SA license.

08:44

Our Ocean: A Finite Resource

The ocean has always sparked human curiosity. In the mid-20th century, people began to realize that there are limits to what humanity should do to our planet before it cannot support life as we know it, limits known as the planetary boundaries. The human population of the planet has reached 7 billion people and will soon approach 11 billion people. We rely on the earth to support us with ecosystem services; the ocean provides these services by regulating the climate system. The oceans have a…

19:44

Subsidiarity (Local Power, Participation, and Community)

This chapter looks at the differences between global capitalism and sustainable development in the realms of political jurisdictions and intergovernmental relations between different nations and cities. This video is licensed under the CC BY-NC-SA license.

15:37

Aggregate Demand with Flexible Exchange Rate

In this chapter, Professor Sachs discusses international trade and how it is affected by the exchange rate, which is in turn affected by financial flows and the differences of interest rates at home and abroad. There are two ways to manage the exchange rates of a country, namely by supply and demand, or by the central bank setting the price. This is explained using the case of exchange rate of Renminbi to the US dollar, as managed by the People’s Bank of China. Countries have the right…

07:33

The Challenge of Urban Politics, Planning and Governance, Part II

Urban politics comes down to making decisions with short, medium, and long-term impacts in a context of scarce resources between competing priorities, making planning very important. Types of planning include spatial planning, strategic planning or growth management planning, spatial literacy planning, precinct-level planning, and other intersectional types of planning. This is considered through the case study of the City of Johannesburg, South Africa. Watch Part I This video is licensed…