On 25 September 2015, in the year it turned 70, the United Nations succeeded in agreeing on a new, comprehensive global development framework, when the delegates of the 193 member states approved the resolution entitled “Transforming our World – the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development”. A few months later, in December of the same year, the COP 21 Paris Agreement on climate change was a spectacular operationalisation of multilateral determination to effectively reach the Sustainable Development Goal on climate action (SDG number 13). The 2030 Agenda is the fruit of long and intensive labour and a key step forward for a process which has held over the past decades [UN-DESA (2012) Back to our common Saez E, Zucman G Future. Sustainable Development in the 21st century (SD21) project].