Attaining Sustainable Development Goals in sub-Saharan Africa; the need to address environmental challenges

Abstract The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is the new developmental agenda that has been embraced by all countries including those of sub-Saharan Africa. The SDGs consists of the economic, social and environmental dimensions. The aim of this short communication is to examine the central role of the environment in sub-Saharan Africa’s march towards achieving the SDGs, though all three dimensions are vital and inter-related. This piece covers an introduction to the SDGs, Africa’s performance on MDG 7, the dynamics of environmental potentials and problems in sub-Saharan Africa and how to address the problems within the context of the SDGs. Pertinent information was gotten from global and African reports on MDGs/SDGs as well as from scientific papers. Sub-Saharan Africa is endowed with a diverse and rich environment, but environmental degradation persists and climate change is an emerging problem. The environment is central to her growth and transformation but there seems to be no end in sight to the cycle of poor environmental management and consequent poverty leading to unsustainable development. With scarce resources at their disposal, the attention of governments across sub-Saharan Africa and other stakeholders need to be drawn continually to environmental problems which constitute a serious impediment to development and viable partnerships need to be established to tackle these problems. Environmental challenges are capable of undermining the SDGs in sub-Saharan Africa. Significant progress will not be made on the SDGs until environmental issues are given a deserved priority by concerned stakeholders.