Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Explosive ordnance risk reduction (EORR) plays an important enabling and transformative role to create the conditions for sustainable development and peace in today’s rapidly changing world. The landscape of EORR activities has altered with emerging and interconnected challenges, including increasingly protracted conflicts and environmental crises, which call for integrated responses to planning, delivery, and monitoring.

The GICHD has a central role in identifying and strengthening the connections between EORR and broader agendas, particularly those relating to humanitarian action, development, and peace efforts. Alongside its partners, the Centre has conducted studies demonstrating the need to look beyond the re-establishment of safe physical living environments and towards longer-term objectives in the design and delivery of programmes.

By further exploring and reinforcing these interconnections, the Centre aims to leverage the transformative role of EORR, increasing coherence between international and national frameworks, and supporting the realisation of collective outcomes for post-conflict stabilisation, reconstruction, and longer-term development.  

Continuous efforts are needed to ensure EORR is more coherently mainstreamed into national sustainable development activities. Therefore, the GICHD continues to support the sector to enhance understanding of the significant linkages between EORR and sustainable development outcomes, with the aim of strengthening effectiveness and efficiency as well as increasing collaborative efforts across the nexus.

The Centre’s innovative and evidence-based research, alongside training and expert advice, supports the sector to align its strategies and action with that of global agendas such as the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development or the sustaining peace agenda. Mainstreaming EORR activities in broader sustainable development and peace planning can support EORR stakeholders to leverage strategic partnerships and join broader collaborative efforts.

To this effect, the Centre has produced a series of case studies demonstrating the contributions of mine action to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in eight countries including Angola, Jordan, Cambodia, Colombia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Somalia, South Sudan, and Iraq. These studies explore the broader impacts of mine action in the medium and long term by assessing the different contributions of land release, victim assistance, and explosive ordnance risk education to the SDGs. The analysis also examines the importance of gender and diversity mainstreaming efforts as well as collaborative partnerships, both within and beyond the sector, for the overarching principle of ‘leaving no one behind’.