Sustainable Development Goals: much ado about nothing?

The UN General Assembly recently adopted the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the context of the 2030 agenda for sustainable development. The article presents a brief reasoned commentary of the SDGs. In particular, it investigates the kind of sustainable development promoted by the SDGs. In this sense, it looks at the question of the precise meaning of sustainable development supported by the 2030 agenda. It then focuses on the relevance, within the SDGs, of the environmental dimension of sustainable development and on its inescapable ecological core. On the basis of the analysis, it emerges that the SDGs may represent a missed opportunity to propose and steer a paradigmatic shift away from the mainstream unsustainable development model, still embedded in a very traditional ‘growth economy’ reference scenario. Therefore, despite their positive features, there is a high risk that the SDGs may finally give rise to ‘much ado about nothing’.