The healthcare and wellbeing goal aims to end preventable deaths of newborns, reduce maternal mortality rate, end communicable diseases (AIDS, TB, Malaria), promote mental health and wellbeing, create a prevention and treatment for substance abuse and achieve universal health coverage.

 

From understaffed hospitals, limited access to public healthcare for patients with special needs or from different backgrounds to the difficulties affording healthcare, Hong Kong patients face several challenges whilst trying to look after themselves.  

The quality education development goal aims to ensure all children have access to completely free and equitable quality primary and secondary education. It strives to ensure childhood development is of a good quality, everyone has an affordable and quality technical, vocational and tertiary education and all learners acquire skills to promote sustainable development.

 

Although access to education has been steadily improving for lower income earners in Hong Kong, the city faces an abundance of problems ranging from the price to the quality of education, cited as being the cause of stress and excessive competitiveness.

The sustainable development goal aims to end all forms of discrimination against women and girls globally. Part of this is to eliminate violence and harmful practices, recognise the value of unpaid care and domestic work, ensure equal opportunities in political, public and economic life and promote legislation for equality and empowerment at all levels.

 

Women make up 85 percent of single parents living in poverty in Hong Kong, and 30 percent of women drop out of the workforce due to caring responsibilities. Gender pay inequality is still a major issue in the city, a 2016 census report showed women working in Hong Kong’s education sector earned HK$9,800 (US$1,250) less than men each month, followed by those in the finance industry

Although the ninth sustainable development goal primarily focuses on developing high quality, reliable, sustainable and resilient infrastructure. A significant aspect of this goal is its aim to increase access to information and communications technology.

 

Among all households with monthly household income below $10,000 in Hong Kong, only 15.3% have computers at home. This undoubtedly creates a gap in the access to technology that has been growing since the early 2000’s. There is a desperate need for long-term and short-term plans and initiatives within this area, with the focus on disadvantaged groups including the elderly, disabled and lower income families on the Digital Divide.

The consumption and sustainability goal aims to achieve sustainable management and efficient use of natural resources, substantially reduce waste generation through prevention, reduction, reuse and recycling, achieve sound management of all chemicals and waste and help developing countries develop sustainably.

 

According to a report in 2014, Hong Kong has the 26th largest per capita ecological footprint of the 150 places surveyed. If everyone lived the lifestyle we lead, we would need 2.6 Earths to fulfill the demand for resources. Hong Kong also has a burgeoning landfill crisis and a reckless ignorance of marine resources, but all of these problems are only accentuated by the lack of awareness as to how much is truly consumed by us as a society- particularly within the city we live in and what we ourselves can do to mitigate the destruction.

Goals 13 to 15 address key environmental issues. Goal 13, climate action, covers the strengthening of resilience and capacity for climate-related hazards and natural disasters in all countries, improving policies, strategies, planning, education and mitigation methods.

 

Goal 14, life below water, aims to reduce water pollution of all kinds, sustainably manage marine/coastal ecosystems, end overfishing and illegal/destructive fishing practices and enhance the conservation and sustainable use of oceans and resources by implementing international law.

 

Goal 15, life on land, strives to ensure the conservation, restoration and sustainable use of terrestrial and inland freshwater ecosystems, promote sustainable management of all types of forests, reduce the degradation of natural habitats, end poaching and trafficking of endangered species and increase global support for these targets.