Sustainable Development Goals for addressing environmental challenges

Sustainability is achieved when we use a portion and preserve the rest for future generations. It has come up as a potential means to combat the ill effects of anthropogenic development and therefore needs to be adapted as the new way of life. The United Nations has targeted to achieve 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by the end of 2030. These include sustainable management of clean water and sanitation, ensuring access to sustainable energy, building a sustainable ecosystem on land as well as water, etc. This chapter focuses on how these SDGs are being achieved or worked upon by recent developments in science. Some of these include replacing cement with agricultural waste composites made from wheat straw and perlite and hydrocarbon degrading microbes. Research works have witnessed the successful removal of heavy metals by plant–microbe symbiosis and the incorporation of agricultural wastes in the textile industry as a replacement of fibres. A few other findings worth mentioning here are the reclamation of waste land by microbes and plants, wastewater and waste-soil treatment using microbes, and aggressively growing plants and lignocellulosic materials. Bioherbicides, bioweedicides and biofuel generation from agricultural wastes have also been explored. Biotechnological interventions and manoeuvring of these microbes and plants promise to further enhance their remediating skills and so can be seen as a powerful tool for alleviating environmental challenges on our way to a sustainable life.