Like the USA my home country Denmark is a rich society, and Denmark and the USA are both countries with a huge material footprint. Denmark is almost as fast as the USA to use the resources that earth can regenerate in a year. Both countries’s Carbon Earth Overshoot Day are in March. By then we have exhausted nature’s budget for the year. For the rest of the year, we are maintaining our ecological deficit by drawing down local resource stocks and accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

If everybody on earth lived like Danes and Americans, we would need four earths. It is a huge problem. It’s a problem that also the 17 Global Goals addresses, in goal number 12 Responsible Consumption and Production, goal number 13 Climate Action and goal number 15 Life on earth.

That is why I came up with the idea to make an organisation for the 17 global goals and named it ‘Global goals in everyday life’. The purpose of the organisation is to help people translate the Global Goals into actions in everyday life. What can I, my family, neighbors, friends and community, do to help implement the goals through actions in everyday life?

One of the first actions in the new organisation was to arrange a Christmas Party in the local community house. Everybody brought some things from home that they didn’t use anymore or that the children didn’t play with anymore. Then others had the opportunity to get it as a Christmas present for someone they knew would be fond of it. The money they paid for it was given to an NGO, which plants trees.

We also had a Christmas lottery with donations e.g. from the local movie theater, the Organic Hair shop, the chocolate shop. The money we collected was given to https://www.maternity.dk/ that aims to reduce maternal and newborn mortality in low and middle-income countries.

We had four workshops at the Christmas Party. One where you could learn about the 17 Global Goals, one where you could make Christmas decorations of recycled materials, one where you could wrap your recycled gift and one were you could make gift cards for experiences.

About 100 guests came to the event and it was a very nice, cozy and climate friendly Christmas Party.