Individual Power

Marina Ponti has devoted her entire working career to making a difference. Her desire to campaign, inspire and mobilize for change moved her from Milan in Italy via the UN headquarters in New York to Bonn, Germany, where the UN SDGs Action Campaign has its office. Her mission is to inspire people and organizations from all backgrounds and every part of the world to take actions to achieve the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

New understanding

The task received an unexpected tailwind from the threats to society created by the pandemic. It is not that Covid-19 has made people in general more aware of the 17 SDGs, or even more aware of the urgency for change, she explains. Covid-19 has shown how far we are from having resilient, inclusive, sustainable societies that leave no one behind.

“New understanding is emerging around the inextricable links and the need for acting across entire systems,” Ponti says. “This offers real hope for unlocking rapid action on daunting challenges such as pandemics, along with deep-seated inequalities and climate change, now and in the future.”

Covid-19, she points out, has shown how interconnected we all are, and how threats that touch us all require global action and solidarity. “Also evident is the profound power of individuals,” she says.

“People who have done the right things, from wearing masks to staying at home, have collectively constrained the spread of the virus. They demonstrate how actions add up and will take us past the turning point and on to transformation.” 

Impossible to stop travelling?

Before Covid-19, she says, everybody knew that governments and leaders in the private sector were unlikely to be prepared to make the changes or sacrifices necessary to reach the sustainability development goals by 2030. As an example, she points to the way we travel. Everyone was aware of the negative impact of emissions from air traffic. Everybody agreed that we flew too much. But too many said that it was impossible to stop traveling, and that their mission was so important they just had to go. 

 
“Then all of a sudden we all stopped traveling,” she says. “We realized that this was possible, and that it was conceivable to redesign our whole society and rethink how we educate, work, invest and move. We were actually doing something that was considered unthinkable only a few months earlier.”

“Companies aware of the fact that sustainable values are changing society are being rewarded,” she says. “The younger generation is much more careful and sensitive in their vision of the future and use sustainability as a factor when purchasing clothes, food or means of transport.” She points out that other less agile sectors are following.

Rome-based ENI, one of the world’s largest oil companies, has declared its transformation from oil to renewable energy production. “This changeover cannot be done overnight, but the company is very serious and has given itself 15 years to move from fossil to renewable energy,” she says. Assessing the impact of the UN SDG Action Campaign’s work is challenging. 

The campaign can obviously measure the number of participants at each event, which can involve up to half a million people who watch and comment across the globe.

Individual actions make a difference

“But change is difficult to measure,” Ponti says. “We are very humble and say that we contribute to creating an environment where leaders who do the right thing know and feel that they have support.”

Returning to her initial thoughts about the impact of the pandemic, she says, “No one can any longer say that  individual actions make no difference. As we saw when facing the pandemic, the only strategy to reduce the spread of the virus was to keep a distance, wear a mask and wash hands, which are individual actions. Somehow this demonstrates how individual actions can lead to transformative change.”