The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the GVI pledge

 

 

1. No poverty

 “end poverty in all its forms everywhere”

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GVI pledges to form a well-connected network of its sprout communities with ready access to training, education, and career opportunities. Sprout communities will be safe public spaces. GVI will offer a wide variety of housing typologies for all, with farming, artisanal crafts, education, and communal support, across each site. Each sprout project will play a key role in its community, employing local skilled trainers and workshops to incubate young start-ups. It will empower a local artisanal community through collaborative projects, providing them with an equal footing in the economy of the village. Establishing a superior education system through green schools will teach a host of needed new skills, and build the balanced, antifragile, local economies of the future.

 

2. Zero hunger

“end hunger, achieve food security and improve nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture”

 

By integrating sustainable agricultural practices into each masterplan design, we ensure that GVI will produce sprout communites where much of the food consumption is farmed on site, strengthening a local farm-to-table ideology. Community run organic farms, aquaponics, aquaculture, greenhouses, animal zones, beehives, nut gardens, fruit trees, and other productive landscapes will create a diverse food variety, ensuring a sustainable and fair food production. Permaculture design using indigenous farming techniques such as the chinampas and hugelkultur, will educate the community into a more healthy understanding of the origins of food and access to it, creating a year round abundance of food and surpluses. Trading posts and open farmers markets will be a platform for exchange of goods and healthy eating practices.

 

3. Good health and well-being

“ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages”

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GVI promotes good health and well-being, physical as well as spiritual. Local clinics and health centers are an early goal of each sprout project. Physical health is promoted through strategies that continually involve movement of the body. Walking is encouraged as way of getting around the community, instead of relying on motorized transportation for day-to-day errands. Space should be allocated for several sports fields, gyms, trails and other settings for physical activity. The biodiverse landscape has many secluded, tranquil areas that invite residents and visitors to enter a more mindful state of being, like yoga spaces on the water and meditation spots in the forest. Locally produced food promotes healthy, balanced nutrition.

 

4. Quality education

“ensure inclusive and equitable education and promote life-long learning opportunities for all”

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Education and experimentation are deeply integrated into the way the GVI community continually learns and grows. Community schools will be in a central space designed to teach the next generation about responsible living in a global context. The innovation and makers’ center will be a learning hub for the entire community, where thought leaders and innovators can share knowledge and techniques with residents and the rest of the region. Health centers will focus on holistic development of body and mind, with classes on yoga, meditation and spirituality.

 

5. Gender equality

“achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.“

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Gender equality in the GVI community will be ensured by providing equal opportunities to both men and women working and living within the community. Extended family and cohousing arrangements allow for neighbors to share the responsibility of day-to-day chores as well as raising children. This allows women more opportunities to participate in activities and be involved in decision-making and further development of the community. This further strengthens gender equality for future generations. Sprout community centers offer shared childcare, cooking, and similar tasks, freeing up time for equal parental responsibilities

 

6. Clean water and sanitation

“ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.”

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GVI handles the scarcity of fresh and clean drinking water by using innovative technologies to harvest and process water. By emphasizing water as a shared community resource that everyone is responsible for, water consumption is limited to a sustainable usage. Rainwater is harvested from all roof surfaces. The water is used for irrigation and in the greywater cycle throughout the community. To avoid mosquito breeding, water is stored and handled in closed systems before it is put to use. The grey and black water from daily water usage will be processed and recycled, making sure that no water is wasted. Agriculture practices will apply drip irrigation very sparingly in the dry season, but primarily retain water in soils through keyline management, biologically effective microorganisms and biochar.

 

7. Affordable and clean energy

“ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.“

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The vision for each GVI sprout community organization is to rely 100% on clean energy sources. By turning wastes to energy with carbon capture, and outfitting buildings with solar panels and wind energy, each village becomes its own self-sufficient power plant. When the generated energy is not being used, it is stored as reserve battery capacity and redistributed outside the community. The energy load profiles of buildings change over time as users turn appliances on and off. By using microgrids to exchange energy between different buildings according to their needs, we can use the generated energy efficiently, and at the same time create an open internet of energy that will make energy generation, distribution and usage more transparent to the end user. GVI will employ state-of-the-art biomass energy with carbon capture and storage to offset more than all its residents’ carbon footprint.

 

7. Decent work and economic growth

“promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all.”

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The GVI community will create jobs and new opportunities for entrepreneurship in the local economy, benefiting all demographics and income groups. From offering live-work accommodations “build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation.“

 

9. Industry, innovation and infrastructure

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All construction within the GVI community will promote new, responsible industries such as bamboo for building construction and ecologically regenerative keyline farming and holistic grasslands management. To promote innovation and communication with the world, a stable internet infrastructure is needed. By using innovative wireless technologies, coupled with biochar shielding against harmful radiation, it is possible to provide healthy wireless internet access to each community, ensuring that the innovations and lessons learned from each experiment can be distributed throughout the world. From international start ups to organic farming, to care services, GVI will create an interdependent resilient economy.

 

10. Reduced inequalities

“reduce inequalities within and among countries.“

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GVI will empower and promote inclusion of all irrespective of age, sex, disability, race, ethnicity, origin and religion. The holistic center creates an environment where spirituality can be practiced regardless of religious affiliations. The wellness center can support rehabilitation of the injured mind and body, as a destination for medical tourism. Green schools will educate empowerment and tolerance. Collective living will help people understanding different walks of life. Technology + Training + Touch = Transformation.

 

11. Sustainable cities and communities

“make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.“

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Going beyond mere sustainability, GVI will build truly regenerative sprout communities, inclusive and open to all people who want to contribute. Resilient towards change in climate and weather conditions, with antifragile cycles of local production and consumption,  a self-sustaining power grid and advanced water treatment facilities, each sprout community builds surpluses that can be shared at increasing scales even while the local ecology is nurtured.

 

12. Responsible consumption and production

“ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.“

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Each GVI sprout community will provide a variety of opportunities for local production and crafts using sustainable, locally sourced materials. Each sprout will build intimate and approachable marketplaces for exchange and trade. Villages use minimally wasteful packaging, recyclable or biodegradable, that can be used as biomass feedstocks and for composting after other uses are no longer viable. GVI will employ the green cell model of natural step (Karl Heinrich Robert), cradle to cradle (William MacDonough) and nothing is waste (Bill Mollison).

 

13. Climate action

“take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts.“

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It is from this crucible that a new way of living will be demonstrated, one that is not only better adapted to the volatile weather ahead but able to mitigate and reverse the process.  Using designs that channel the energy of change into positive initiatives, GVI is inherently antifragile, not merely resilient. This is equally true of the design of the landscape, the forests, and the key infrastructure. Going beyond adaptation and carbon neutrality, GVI  employs carbon farming tools such as keyline, holistic management, climate ecoforestry, and waste-to-energy plus biochar. GVI will take carbon from both the atmosphere and the ocean and put back in the soil where it belongs, in ways that produce better, more nutrient-dense food, in forms that will remain for thousands of years. GVI will create the world’s first global cooling nations.

 

14. Life below water

“conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development.“

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GVI designs sprout communities to be in complete symbiosis with the oceans and waterways.  It will create waste remediation lagoons, chinampas, aquaculture systems and estuarial wetlands, reinforcing and protecting the life of marine ecosystems and aquatic biodiversity.

 

15. Life on land

“protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss”

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GVI designs sprout communities to be in complete symbiosis with the land.  Woven into a fabric of permaculture, sustainable land use encourages a large network of community scale gardens and farming. Where the young existing forests need reinforcement bamboo groves will be planted reinforcing a culture of agroforestry. Where the land is prone to flooding dig and fill will create higher grounds prepping new soil for planting and development. The residences find themselves immersed in the tree canopy, giving community members a constant connection with nature.

 

16. Peace, justice and strong institutions

“promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels”

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GVI innovation centers, green schools, and holistic training centers set a strong base, inviting and teaching positive and democratic ideals, promoting care and respect for one’s self, those in the community, and those in the extended region. Co-living accommodations and shared amenity spaces at the district scale will re-enforce the ideology and practice of peaceful interactions and activities. GVI will encourage and train residents to use  eco-covenants, conflict mediation committees and councils of homeowners.

 

17. Partnerships for the goals

“strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development.”

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Each GVI sprout community will be a focal point inviting today’s most progressive and innovative minds to share research and findings about how to build and live in resilient and regenerative societies. Sister city partnerships will be formed to create different case studies for fulfilling the 17 goals. GVI hubs will be organized on the principle of partnerships and programmatic overlapping, re-thinking how commercial exchange, making, education, innovation, and living can overlap.