These Are the Goals the UN Set to Combat Poverty and Address Climate Change

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The United Nations adopted on Friday a sweeping set of global goals that put the environment front and center within a broader development agenda, calling for member nations to fix climate change, cut food waste, and put an end to overfishing.

Speaking before the UN General Assembly, Pope Francis reflected on the diminishing divide between environmental protection and more traditional developmental goals, such as the eradication of poverty.

"Human beings are part of the environment," he said. "The poorest are … cast off by society, forced to live off what is discarded and suffer unjustly from the abuse of the environment."

The so-called Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) come as the successor of the Millennial Development Goals (MDGs), which are set to expire at the end of the year. The new package includes 17 general goals, which together lay out more than 169 specific development targets to be met by 2030. The development blueprint also sets goals for phasing out subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, which will top $5 trillion this year, according to the International Monetary Fund, and calls on countries to commit $100 billion annually by 2020 to aid developing countries in their efforts to address climate change.

Related: The Pope Promotes 'Right of the Environment' and Global Welfare in Rousing UN Speech

While skeptics have said that the agenda is too ambitious, and lacks necessary enforcement mechanisms, policy makers and scientists are celebrating the outcome as a more comprehensive approach to development.

For Molly Elgin-Cossart, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, it was time for the environment and development agenda to collide. She acted as chief of staff for a high-level panel, appointed by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, to develop the seventeen targets.

"It has been a false divide for many years," she said. "It is something that bureaucrats and nonprofits who only focus on one thing can perpetuate, and it doesn't reflect the reality of the people."

The new goals also depart from the traditional development model in their inclusion of targets directed specifically at rich countries. Elgin-Cossart said, "The bottom billion are not the problem, the top billion are."

One such goal is to reduce by half per capita global food waste at both the retail and consumer levels, as well as along production and supply chains. Currently, Americans throw away an estimated 40 percent of food in the United States, which accounts for $162 billion in wasted food each year. And according to Dana Gunders, a scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, these goals are not separate from larger development concerns.

"The United Nations estimates that we will need 60 percent more food by 2050," she said. "The question we need to answer is how we can increase efficiency before we plow down more native land with the goal of growing more food."

But not everyone is convinced that UN development goals are very meaningful. Between 1990 and 2015, while the MDGs were in place, extreme poverty in developing countries fell from 49 to 14 percent while the mortality rate for children under five was more than halved. Many economists, however, have pointed to economic growth and increased trade during that period, namely in China, as more viable explanations for the drop in extreme poverty.

Of the 15 millennial goals that were set, the only one that was met was the goal of cutting extreme poverty by half. And there are reasons to question how effective the new goals will be, not least of which is the absence of any mechanism for holding governments or private parties accountable, despite their declared intentions to follow the new guidelines.

"For the time being, the question of accountability has been kicked down the road," said Elgin-Cossart.

Related: Pope Francis Says Earth Is Beginning to Look Like an 'Immense Pile of Filth'

The World Resources Institute, which has been involved in meetings that led to the drafting of the SDGs, has outlined four major challenges that stand between the signed agreement and its realized success: government involvement, broad societal engagement, buy-in from financial institutions, and accountability.

"We need to figure out how we get ministries and the government to talk to one another more effectively, and for them to speak with the private sector," said Manish Bapna, the executive vice president and managing director of the World Resources Institute. "Much of what this is going to take is greater integration and coherence ­­— horizontal coherence, and vertical coherence, among different levels of government."

Implementation and support by local governments will remain a large challenge. The new goals included a more diverse set of stakeholders and constituencies that UN representatives will work with on the country level, the theory being that local actors will feel more ownership over the process. This is just one of many lessons that officials say they took from the process of drawing up the millennium goals.

"Already, these goals are more owned, and they have more legitimacy that the millennial development goals," said Olav Kjorven, director of public partnerships for UNICEF, the UN branch focused on children's rights. "The millennium goals were sprung on the world by then Secretary General Kofi Annan and they were not the result of an inclusive process — now, there has been a people's channel straight into it."

Last week, the United States unveiled its own plans for reaching goals related to food waste and increasing access to legal aid, two of the targets laid out in the new sustainability goals. But much work remains to be done.

"We need to take a moment to pause, take a step back, and realize how far we have come," said Bapna. "But I don't want to overstate the ease of the task before us — the easy part is over, the hard part lies ahead.

Follow Eva Hershaw on Twitter: @beets4eva