It’s funny the things you notice when you’re on holiday. And I’m not talking about the various levels of danger when it comes to crossing the road, or the strange food combinations that are incomprehensible to the foreign mind.

With two small children, summer is almost exclusively when we go abroad, and over the last few years, we have been assailed by an unexpected phenomenon that makes me worry Transforming Tomorrow is travelling with us.

In travels across Europe for the past few years (I’m not sure what Chiara Donelli would make of these travels given our discussions on over-tourism, but in our defence we spent a large part of this year’s break in a Danish town where we saw at most three other British people), I have seen sustainability messaging here, there and everywhere. It is aimed at tourists, visitors and the general public.

It might be the last two years has made me more attuned to spotting the SDGs, but I promise (whatever my LinkedIn profile might suggest) I don’t spend all my time thinking about podcasts, and nothing I have seen strikes me as being years old.

In Aarhus this summer – great place, would recommend, try the fish – I was walking on the quayside next to the Dokk1 building – a gigantic public library that also incorporates playgrounds, Lego, architecture and (when I was visiting) a man being filmed while walking out of a lift time after time with a bicycle. I don’t expect the latter is a permanent fixture – if it is, then the Danes have taken performance art to a whole new level – but the ground level decorations on the south side of the building are.

As cyclists glide past and pedestrians saunter along, they cannot miss the SDG logos on the side of what is one of the biggest buildings in town. This is no small logo stuck in a corner window, or a poster plastered onto a column that will be gone come next Tuesday. Rather, the side of the lower level of the building – all glass, about two storeys tall – displays the icons for each of the individual SDGs. I knew them as soon as I saw them from 50 yards away, and next to an entrance is a small message supporting the goals. But I was impressed that there is no huge campaign around the topic, no big event to tie it to – it is just there, 365 days a year, for people to take in. As in life, the SDGs in Aarhus are a permanent fixture for everyone.

[Photo: Paul Turner]

It was similar in Copenhagen – could (should) have stayed longer, lovely vibe, good bakery selection. At the top the stairs and escalators from the basement entrance of the Danish Architecture Centre – four stars, good café on the roof, huge slide suitable for both children and adults – are the SDGs laid out on the pavement. Again, no broader context, though this time they are bright and colourful rather than black and white, which grabs the attention of all the little ones heading into the DAC or to the playground on its outside.

There is more text at the DAC simply because each of the SDGs have their names written out on the logos (or I assume they do, my Danish is not up to much, so it could instead be an elaborate recipe for dream cake – love it, unexpected coconut flavour, nice texture when done well), but again no obvious driving reason to have it there other than the desire to promote sustainability.

You see more focus on related issues inside the DAC, where my visit coincided with an exhibit called Recycle! (their exclamation mark, not mine). We have spoken many times on about recycling and the circular economy – from the Plastic Packaging in People’s Lives project, to the perils of knowing whether or not you can recycle the plastic window in your paper envelopes – but this looked at it all on a bigger scale, with regards to buildings, how they can be reused and repurposed, and how we cannot afford to keep knocking them down and starting completely from scratch. The exhibition itself is built so that the nuts, bolts, screws and other parts can all be reused after it is finished.

It's not the first time I have come across exhibits with a sustainability emphasis on recent holidays. Last year in Cologne – nice enough for a few days if you don’t mind the constant hustle, probably too many cobbles. At the Lindt Chocolate Museum, early in the journey through chocolate manufacturing there was a display about the SDGs and Lindt’s efforts to work towards them. In this circumstance there is a definite corporate angle as the company looks to make it seem as though they are all in on sustainability (a mark of 25.6/100 from Jan’s favourite World Benchmarking Alliance on the Food and Agriculture benchmark suggests there may be a lot of work still to be done). But even so, I find it hard to believe they would have given over this much space to the topic in a tourist attraction even 10 years ago.

As we start to record the third series of Transforming Tomorrow – with episodes being released from mid-October, maybe I will notice the SDG messaging even more and prove that it is all because I’m being indoctrinated, or perhaps it is just more visible year on year.

[Photo: Paul Turner]

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