In a\u00a0recent report<\/a>\u00a0on the state of the world\u2019s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the U.N. Secretary General did not mince his words: \u201cAn urgent rescue effort is needed\u2026to get the SDGs back on track.<\/em>\u201d Three years into a global pandemic and related social and economic crises, a projected\u00a075-95 million more<\/a>\u00a0people are living in extreme poverty, hundreds of millions of\u00a0children have missed out<\/a>\u00a0on critical education, and global energy-related\u00a0CO2 emissions are on the rise again<\/a>\u00a0in a world riddled by violent conflict and deepening geopolitical division.<\/p> The SDGs\u2014which embody the world\u2019s foremost economic, social, and environmental ambitions to be achieved by 2030\u2014were no easy fix to begin with. Not because solutions and resources to achieve the SDGs do not exist, but because the SDGs are challenges that must be addressed\u00a0together<\/em>. Go-it-alone approaches will not cut it: Technical advances and financing required within each SDG must be coupled with policies and politics that manage tradeoffs across all the goals to ensure that no one is left behind. Getting the SDGs back on track will require nothing short of a global collective effort\u2014by all and for all.<\/p> Yet, the world\u2019s existing capacities to forge international cooperation, represent citizen interests, and spark new forms of collaboration and innovation for planetary sustainability and societal wellbeing are clearly not measuring up to the scale and urgency that a rescue effort for the SDGs demands.<\/p> A biologist or behavioral scientist might suggest that what\u2019s needed to rescue the SDGs is collective intelligence.\u00a0Collective intelligence<\/a>\u00a0refers to the ability of a system to perform at levels greater than the sum of its individual parts. Ants in a colony, neurons in a nervous system, or musicians in an ensemble produce impressive collective-level feats that no individual ant, neuron, or musician can achieve alone. Intelligent collectives, in turn, provide an environment in which individuals can survive and thrive.<\/p> Collective intelligence for the SDGs would require the global system\u2014made up of traditional sovereign-based institutions of international cooperation as well as an increasingly diverse ecosystem of subnational, civil society, and private-sector actors\u2014to perform at levels greater than the sum of its parts to drive progress within each 17 SDGs and across all goals at once.<\/p> Read the full article about collective impact and the SDGs by Jacob Taylor at Brookings.