Senate Creates Committee on Sustainable Development Goals, Innovation and Futures Thinking

Through Philippine Senate Resolution (PSR) 122, the Committee on SDGs, Innovations, and Futures Thinking was created to oversee the country’s progress in achieving its commitments to the SDGs by the year 2030. The resolution was sponsored by Senate Majority Floor Leader Juan Miguel Zubiri and adopted unanimously by the senators.

The creation of the sub-committee is key in ensuring consistency of legislation to the SDGs and will be a critical committee in providing legislation supportive of long term planning to achieve AmBisyon Natin 2040. According to Senator Pia S. Cayetano, who serves as Committee Chair, “I believe that the biggest contribution of the Committee would be on [tackling] overlapping goals… Many times, a committee is left within the confines of a bill pending before it… That’s why the SDGs Committee is secondarily referred to ensure that we take a bigger picture.”

The new committee would oblige the Senate to allot the needed time and resources and assess current policies that will impact the future generations. “That is something that we tend to neglect precisely because by human nature and survival, we tend to focus on the problems on hand. The objective here is to be planning for the future, to think out of the box,” Senator Cayetano adds. Hence, subsuming sustainable development, innovation, and futures thinking in a single committee is strategic not achieving the SDGs by 2030 but also in legislating policies that are cognizant of the interplay of social, economic, environmental and governance factors in the upcoming decades.