The United Nations is launching a global campaign with a media blitz and an array of stars from Beyonce to Usain Bolt to spread news to everyone in the world about its new goals to eradicate poverty, fight inequality and combat climate change.
The campaign is scheduled to begin on Sept. 25 when world leaders are expected to adopt the 17 goals at a U.N. General Assembly summit.
Film writer and director Richard Curtis, who is leading the campaign, told a news conference Thursday that he wants to make these new goals “much more famous and much more well-known” than the eight U.N. Millennium Development Goals adopted at a summit in 2000 which they will succeed.
The new goals, which have 169 specific targets, range from ending poverty “in all its forms everywhere” to ensuring quality education and affordable and reliable energy, and protecting the environment. They are and will remain officially called the Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, which one journalist at the press conference called an “ugly and horrible name.”
